John Barton (director)

John Bernard Adie Barton, CBE (26 November 1928 – 18 January 2018) was a British theatre director and (with Peter Hall) a co-founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Early life
John Barton was the son of Sir Harold Montague and Lady Barton (née Joyce Wale). He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge and while at Cambridge directed and acted in many productions for the Marlowe Society and the ADC. At the Westminster Theatre in July 1953 he directed his first London production, Henry V for the Elizabethan Theatre Company.  He created a 12-part series for BBC Radio on the medieval Mysteries, inspired by the York Mystery Plays.

Royal Shakespeare Company
In 1960, along with Peter Hall, he co-founded the Royal Shakespeare Company where Barton was an active director for over 40 years. He directed over 50 productions, some in collaboration with Hall and Trevor Nunn. His landmark productions at the RSC include 1969's Twelfth Night with Judi Dench as Viola, and the 1963/1964 sequence of Histories (with Hall and Clifford Williams). In the RSC's 50th anniversary commemorations (2011) Barton's teaching was acknowledged as one of the lasting reasons for the company's success and he is regarded as one of the most influential directors of Shakespeare of his time.

At the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1980, Barton directed The Greeks, his adaptations (with playwright Kenneth Cavander) from Homer, Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, ten plays centring on the Oresteia legend, presented in the terse style of the original verse. This was part of an RSC London season which also embraced Trevor Nunn and John Caird's production of David Edgar's eight-hour adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. "Both projects were daunting undertakings, planned at a time of renewed financial crisis, and both proved remarkably successful."
 
In 1982, while working with 21 RSC members, including Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Michael Pennington, David Suchet, Sinéad Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Roger Rees, Jane Lapotaire and Peggy Ashcroft, Barton recorded nine workshop sessions for London Weekend Television. These programmes, together entitled Playing Shakespeare, were aired that year on Channel 4 and became the source material for Barton's best-selling book of the same name. Though stiff in his resolve against writing on the subject of performing Shakespeare, the surprising success of the televised series convinced Barton to produce a book. It, too, found great success, and remains a popular guide to performing Shakespeare among working actors and aspirants. Playing Shakespeare, the ITV series, is available on DVD.

Barton is quoted in an article by Michael Billington as saying "the success or failure of the RSC depends on the quality of the actors. If I've learned anything in my time, it is that if you get the right combination of actors, a production will generally work... But one should always remember that no theatre company is immortal and Zeus could still chuck a thunderbolt at any moment".

Barton possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of Shakespeare and is known to be able to identify one of his plays from a single line of text. A story is told of Barton getting so into his directorial work giving notes one night, that he fell into the orchestra pit, climbed out, and dusted himself off before resuming. A great deal of the past and continuing success of the RSC is attributed to John Barton and to his unrivalled wisdom of language, verse, character, and voice.

Barton continued these workshops and conducted Master Classes at BADA (British American Drama Academy) during their Summer in Oxford training programmes. He was awarded the 2001 Sam Wanamaker Prize. Barton believed that the present-day speech of the Appalachian Mountains is the most suitable model for actors who want to imitate the accent used at the time of Shakespeare's plays.

In 1969, he married the former Anne Righter, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar at Girton College, Cambridge (later Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge). Anne Barton died in November 2013.

Notable stage productions
1963 -  The Hollow Crown 
1963 - The War of the Roses 
1968 - Troilus and Cressida 
1969 - Twelfth Night 
1971 - Othello 
1973 - Richard II 
1976 - Much Ado About Nothing 
1977 - The Pillars of the Community 
1978 - Love's Labour's Lost 
1978 - Merchant of Venice 
1978 - The Way of the World 
1980 - The Greeks 
1981 - Merchant of Venice 
1986 - The Rover 
1988 - Three Sisters 
1995 - Cain 
1995 - Life's a Dream 
1995 - Waste 
2000 - Tantalus

Filmography 
As cast member/instructor:

1982 – Playing Shakespeare (TV)

As writer:

1965 – The Wars of the Roses (TV)
1970 – Hallmark Hall of Fame – Hamlet (adaptation) (TV)
1984 – Morte d'Arthur (adaptation) (TV)
1991 – The War That Never Ends (TV)

As director:

1965 – War of the Roses (TV)
1968 – All's Well That Ends Well (TV)

As actor:

1984 – Morte d'Arthur – Sir Thomas Malory

References 

The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades by Sally Beauman, Oxford (1982) 
Who's Who in the Theatre, 17th edition; Volume 1, ed. Ian Herbert, Gale (1981)  (Barton's own CV, p. 47).

Bibliography
Barton, John; Cavander, Kenneth. Ten Greek Plays Given as a Trilogy. London: Heinemann, 1981. 
Barton, John. Playing Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1984. 
Greenwald, Michael L. Directions by Indirections (John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company). Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1985
Pearson, Richard. A Band of Arrogant and United Heroes (Adelphi Press, 1992)

External links
 John Barton at the British Film Institute
 
 

Category:1928 births
Category:2018 deaths
Category:Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
Category:English theatre directors
Category:People educated at Eton College