Braham Murray
Director who fought to keep the Royal Exchange Theatre open following the Manchester bombing
BRAHAM MURRAY, who has died aged 75, was the last surviving founder director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, and kept it running after it was devastated by an IRA bomb in 1996; he was also credited with saving Joe Orton’s black comedy Loot from theatrical oblivion.
Murray first made his name aged 21 with the revue Hang Down Your Head and Die, an Oh! What a Lovely Wartype show about capital punishment which he wrote and directed as an undergraduate at the Oxford Playhouse in 1964. It transferred to the West End, where it starred Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and later to Broadway, where it bombed.
The following year Murray became the country’s youngest artistic director – at the Century Theatre, a touring company which took up residence at the University Theatre, Manchester. He had admired the work of Caspar Wrede and Michael Elliott at the 59 Theatre Company, based at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and persuaded the two men to renew their collaboration in Manchester. There, the trio founded the 69 Theatre Company, which became known as the Royal Exchange Theatre Company after moving into the newly renovated Manchester Stock Exchange in 1976.
Over the next four decades, Murray directed more than 100 productions, ranging from Shakespeare to musicals and opera. His first production, Sheridan’s The Rivals (1976), starred Tom Courtenay, Christopher Gable, James Maxwell and Patricia Routledge, and he went on to work with many other leading stars including Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, Pete Postlethwaite and Robert Lindsay, and Brenda Blethyn and Lindsay Duncan.
In 2001 he directed Loot, Joe Orton’s black comedy, with Derek Griffiths, Gabrielle Drake and Colin Prockter, for the second time in his career. He had first directed it in 1966 when he was running the Century Theatre.
The play had debuted in 1965 in a touring production, directed by Peter Wood and starring a miscast Kenneth Williams as Truscott, the vicious, corrupt police inspector investigating the bank heist carried out by Dennis, an undertaker’s assistant, and his boyfriend Hal. The tour was catastrophic. Much of the black humour (involving the bank robbers stashing the cash in the coffin containing Hal’s mother, Mrs Mccleavy) had been excised on the orders of the Lord Chamberlain. Reviews were scathing, and by the time it closed the London Evening News was condemning “one of the most revolting” productions of the century.
In 1965, however, Murray decided to take it up. Before rehearsals began, Orton made some radical alterations to the script, condensing it from three acts to two. As Murray recalled: “I would visit him in his Islington flat to discuss the changes while his frankly terrifying companion, Kenneth Halliwell [who would bludgeon Orton to death in 1967], sat like a bloated spider in the corner.”
Meanwhile, Murray petitioned the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which he had previously defeated over Hang Down Your Head and Die: “When I turned up at Lieutenant-colonel Eric Penn’s office his reaction was, ‘Oh, not you again!’ He capitulated pretty quickly.” Back came the undressing of Mrs Mccleavy’s corpse, and lines such as “your wreaths have been blown to b-----y”.
Peter Wood later admitted that he had “made the mistake of thinking Loot far too much of a Restoration play in modern times”. Murray felt that, although Orton’s language was stylised, the situation had to be played for real. Instead of Wood’s fantastical art nouveau set, Murray set the action in a typical Manchester bourgeois front room.
“I persuaded Julian Chagrin to play Truscott and he was quite hysterically funny, so funny that it was almost impossible to get through rehearsals,” Murray recalled.
On the first night, “there were policemen in the stalls, and the city fathers sat following the text with a torch. But there was no riot, people loved it and we got good reviews. Joe was very pleased.” The play was subsequently optioned by the West End producers Oscar Lewenstein and Michael White and went on to become a huge hit, winning the Evening
Standard award for best play. Braham Murray was born Braham Goldstein, to Jewish parents in north London, on February 12 1943. His father, Sam, wanted him to be called Abraham; his mother did not want him to be known as Abe and so lopped off the initial letter. His parents’ marriage broke down and he became Murray after his mother married his stepfather Philip Murray.
Young Braham was sent as a boarder to a prep school near Newbury, which he chiefly remembered for “sex, anti-semitism and Shakespeare”: “On the last night of our last term the leavers had a one-to-one talk in the headmaster’s study. Mine went something like this: ‘When you leave here you’ll find another sort of chap and they are called girls. All I want to say to you is – never consort with prostitutes. Good luck.’ My hand was shaken and I went to face my public school fully armed. That was the sex.”
At a more enlightened Clifton College, Murray’s performance as the tailor, Morry, in Wolf Mankovitz’s The
Bespoke Overcoat won his house the school drama competition, and he went on to win again as a director with Ionesco’s Jacques. He read English at University College, Oxford, but neglected his studies for the theatre, his productions including The Connection by Jack Gelber, The Hostage by Brendan Behan, A Man for all Seasons by Robert Bolt and Rhinoceros by Ionesco.
The overnight success of Hang Down Your Head and Die persuaded Murray to drop out of university in 1964 and, he recalled, “convinced me that I was God’s gift to theatre”. On Broadway, however, the New York Times critic likened the experience of sitting through the revue to being “in a torture chamber” – making Murray realise “how little I actually knew”.
Yet, after a brief period at Birmingham Rep under the benign stewardship of John Harrison, such setbacks did not prevent him from becoming Britain’s youngest artistic director at the Century Theatre.
Though Murray remained behind the scenes for most of his career at the Royal Exchange Theatre, occasionally he stood in when an actor was indisposed. Once he took over as Romeo when Tom Courtenay developed vocal problems, but with Murray being of a different build, his tights kept falling down. Ian Mckellen was in the audience and, as Murray recalled, “to this day, whenever I bump into him, he puts his hand on my shoulder and whispers in my ear, ‘Saw your Romeo’.”
In June 1996 an IRA bomb was detonated less than 160 feet from the theatre, the resulting explosion devastating the building. It would take a huge fundraising effort, and more than £32 million from the National Lottery, to repair the damage.
“We had to relocate to Upper Campfield Market, where we set up our mobile theatre,” Murray recalled. “But, in a strange way, it bonded our company with our loyal core audience even closer and we returned to our new, secure building in great spirits … It was an exciting, thrilling time re-imagining the theatre and persuading the Arts Council that they shouldn’t withdraw their grant just because we’d been blown up.”
Re-opened in 1998 by Prince Edward, the refurbished theatre opened with a production of Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes, the play that had been running when the bomb went off.
Murray’s last production under the auspices of the Royal Exchange, in collaboration with Sir Mark Elder and the Halle, was Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town, starring Connie Fisher, which opened at the Lowry Theatre, Salford, in 2012 before going on tour.
Murray, a devoted fan of Tottenham Hotspur, published his autobiography The Worst It Can Be Is a Disaster in 2007 and How to Direct a Play in 2011.
He was appointed OBE in 2010 for services to drama.
He had two sons by his marriage to the theatre designer Johanna Bryant, which was dissolved.
Braham Murray, born February 12 1943, died July 25 2018