Theatre director Michael Bogdanov dies aged 78

Michael Bogdanov, the bold theatre director who staged ambitious Shakespeare history cycles for his own company and the controversial The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre, has died aged 78.

Bogdanov co-founded the English Shakespeare Company with the actor Michael Pennington in 1986 and promptly toured the UK and Europe with the Henry plays and the seven-play epic The Wars of the Roses. He had been inspired both by seeing Richard Burton on stage as a schoolboy – “No filtering phrases through a pound of plums but an electrifying Welsh twang” – and later by working as assistant director to Peter Brook on his groundbreaking A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the RSC in 1970. In his 2003 book Shakespeare: The Director’s Cut, Bogdanov wrote that he came to see staging Shakespeare as “like reading a detective story, piecing the clues together, never taking anything for granted, ignoring received opinion”.

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A scene depicting attempted male rape in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain, staged in 1980, led to an unsuccessful private prosecution brought against Bogdanov by the campaigner Mary Whitehouse – who had not seen the play – which accused him of having procured an act of gross indecency between two actors. The trial at the Old Bailey in London was halted after three days.

In 1987, Bogdanov told Michael Parkinson that the episode “affected me more than I thought at the time … The further that the whole thing went on, the more ludicrous it became and the more real became the danger that in fact I would end up being found guilty under this subsection of the 1956 Sexual Offences Act which was never designed to apply to the stage at all … It told me a tremendous amount about the English public, the English establishment and also the media who really fanned the whole thing in the most extraordinary way.”

Born Michael Bogdin to a Ukrainian father and a Welsh mother, Bogdanov ran a pub in Wales and was a cabaret performer before becoming artistic director of the Tyneside theatre company, Leicester’s Phoenix theatre and the Young Vic in London. At the National in 1977 he staged adaptations of both the Middle English chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. From 1980 to 1988 he was associate director at the National where he staged plays by Molière and Chekhov as well as his own adaptation of the epic poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Bogdanov won an Olivier award for his modern-dress production of The Taming of the Shrew with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978 and later directed The Knight of the Burning Pestle, starring Timothy Spall, for the RSC. His version of Macbeth, with Sean Pertwee and Greta Scacchi, was broadcast by Channel 4 in 1998 and his other TV productions included a Tempest staged in Tiger Bay with non-professional actors.

Bogdanov was chief executive of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg (1989-92) and in 2003 founded the Wales Theatre Company for whom he directed the musical Amazing Grace and a musical based on Colleen McCullough’s novel The Thorn Birds. Throughout his career he also put on productions at the Royal Opera House, Sydney Opera House and La Scala.

The actor and director Samuel West, who revived The Romans in Britain at the Crucible in Sheffield, was among those paying tribute to Bogdanov: “His shows made Shakespeare feel like our contemporary.”