Theatre director who was prosecuted for obscenity
Michael Bogdanov 1938-2017
The theatre director Michael Bogdanov, who has died aged 78, made it his mission to shake audiences out of their complacency, and into some kind of action. His Measure for Measure had actors in punk costumes; a Taming of the Shrew featured military bands and a motorcycle. A “cultural iconoclast”, an “unreconstructed socialist” and a man of great passion and warmth, he loved to provoke, said Michael Coveney in The Guardian, and had the reviews to prove his success in that ambition. But “Bodger”, as he was widely known, got more than he bargained for when, in 1980, his production of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain landed him in court, on charges of attempting to procure an act of gross indecency on the stage of the National’s Olivier Theatre.
The case had a political background, said The Daily Telegraph. Brenton had just staged a skit about Thatcherism (originally entitled Ditch the Bitch) at the Theatre Royal Stratford East that was so vicious, the then arts minister, Norman St John-stevas, had felt moved to apologise to the Commons for the fact that it had received public funding. So all eyes were on what the playwright would do next, and when reporters heard that his new work featured, centre stage, an attempted male rape (of a naked druid by a Roman soldier), they wasted no time in tipping off Mary Whitehouse, the morality campaigner. Refusing to see the play herself, she asked the police to get involved, on the grounds that public safety was being imperilled: male theatregoers, she said, would be “so stimulated” that they might “commit attacks on young boys”.
The attorney general, Michael Havers, reviewed the evidence and declined to take the matter further – at which point Whitehouse discovered that, owing to a loophole in the law, she could bring a prosecution herself, under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act (a law introduced to deter sexual encounters in public lavatories). The press had a field day. But for Bogdanov it was a nightmare: if convicted, he faced up to two years in jail. In the meantime, he was bombarded with abusive phone calls, had dog excrement put through his door, and his children were bullied at school. It took 18 months for the case to come to court, and three days for it to collapse, after the defence showed that the “buggery” was a mime, and that what the prosecution’s sole witness (a solicitor acting as Whitehouse’s proxy) had taken to be the tip of a penis was actually the actor’s thumb.
Born in South Wales, Michael Bogdanov was the son of Francis Bogdin, a librarian of Lithuanian descent, and his Welsh wife, Rhoda. The family moved to London during the War, and Bogdanov grew up in Ruislip. His parents were both left-wing: when other families ran up the Union flag on VE Day, the Bogdins flew the hammer and sickle. Michael later changed his name because it was so often mispronounced, but it didn’t always help: in the US, he was once introduced at a lecture as Mr Dogbananas.
Educated at The John Lyon School in Harrow, he went from there to Trinity College Dublin, where he became involved in the Irish theatre scene. Returning to England, he worked as Peter Brook’s assistant on a radical RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970), featuring trapezes and spinning plates. Bogdanov then became artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester, ran the Young Vic, and worked for many years at the National and at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In 1986, he co-founded the English Shakespeare Company, dedicated to touring. “Basically, my theatre – when I am working with Shakespeare – is designed for people who have never been to the theatre before,” he said. Their first production was a ninehour marathon consisting of Henry IV, Part I and Part II, and Henry V, that mixed modern, medieval and Edwardian costumes. A later staging, The Wars of the Roses, won him an Olivier Award in 1990. In 2003, he formed the Wales Theatre Company. He kept a home in Wales, and ran a pub in the Brecon Beacons.