When Peter Hall set up the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 one of the first people he turned to was John Barton, a friend from Cambridge days. Fortunately for Hall, Barton was unhappy in his academic “cul-de-sac”.
Their celebrated staging of The Wars of the Roses (1963), in which they turned four Shakespeare plays into three, 15 hours of writing into ten and dispensed with 60 characters, was an example of their remarkable collaboration, which lasted for almost 40 years until a spectacular falling out. Barton began by writing the occasional linking lines and cutting bits from the original, but then he fell into what he supposed was the Elizabethan practice of reshaping other playwrights’ old plays. In the end it was hard to know what was Shakespeare and what was Barton. “Peter and I talked things over and then I went off and wrote some stuff and took it along like a dog with a bone and got Peter’s reactions,” he told The Times in 1972.
Some of his mash-ups got Barton into trouble. When he adapted King John in 1974, Harold Hobson, the Sunday Times critic, described the result as “an inchoate amalgam of disparate elements presented under a misleading title in the name of an author who did not write it.” Barton accepted some responsibility because the posters saying “By William Shakespeare” had been printed before he realised how much of the original he was going to alter.
Where Hall (obituary, September 13, 2017) was the ebullient public face of the RSC, Barton was its silent resident sage, rarely speaking to either press or public. He was a doer rather than a talker, insisting that it was impossible to describe how a play would develop under his direction; he had to see how it worked with the actors. “One may talk about what one thinks one’s doing, but what one actually does is something quite different, and one might not even know what it was,” he said.
He never ran the RSC, nor did he want to. “I’m not at all interested in being an administrator,” he said, adding that directing his own productions was responsibility enough. Yet he could be a tough taskmaster. Hall once spoke of Barton’s “martial discipline” and he was said to have disapproved of actors taking breaks between 10am and 10pm. “All directors have to push their actors to go further than they think they can go, and a lot of actors don’t go beyond a certain point unless you push them hard,” he explained.
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There were also his own, idiosyncratic ways of maintaining concentration. Chewing razor blades was one, although in later years he preferred a yellow-green nicotine gum. Nevertheless, he was famously absent-minded, sometimes having six cigarettes on the go at the same time. One actor claimed to have been driven across London at 90mph by Barton, who had his legs crossed. On one occasion he walked backwards straight off the stage, but on picking himself up continued with his sentence. On another he got his foot jammed in a metal bin but carried on walking, occasionally shaking his leg as if he was unsure what was stuck there.
Barton played down the eccentric boffin image, claiming to be lighthearted in disposition. “I’ve always been illiterate,” he said, stretching the truth somewhat. “I can go a year without reading a book.” In fact, no one knew more about Shakespeare’s plays than Barton and no one knew the texts so well. “Perhaps John’s greatest influence on the company, and hence to the profession, was his passion for verse, and his ability to uncover the clues that Shakespeare wrote into the text to enable actors to deliver it with freshness and vivid clarity,” said Greg Doran, the present artistic director of the RSC.
John Bernard Adie Barton was born in 1928, the son of Sir Harold Barton, the head of a large accounting firm who would help with the books of young John’s theatrical enterprises, and his wife Joyce (née Wale). He was educated at Eton, where he persuaded the headmaster that there ought to be a school play and then starred as Hotspur in his own production of Henry IV (Part One).
At Cambridge he read English, but much of his time was taken up with the theatre. He was a member of the Marlowe Society and president of the Amateur Dramatic Club. As a student he played about 40 parts, including Mercutio to Hall’s Tybalt, and wrote three plays partly in verse, one of which was directed by Hall. There was limited time for rehearsing. “I did an Edward II in two weeks,” Barton recalled. “Of course you make mistakes, but you haven’t got time to go up your own arse.”
For a year he taught at a drama school in California, but came away doubting that such an enterprise was worthwhile for students or teachers. “If someone’s a good actor, they’re e’en at it, doing it,” he said, breaking into archaic phrasing, as he would do for visitors with greetings such as “come ye thither”.
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He returned to Cambridge as a research student, writing one dissertation on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (once misheard by an astonished actor as “werewolf”) and another about the Elizabethan stage. He then accepted a fellowship in the hope that he would have the time and security to write, but found himself unable to produce either plays or literary criticism. “I really became a don by mistake,” he told The Times. “I’d never planned to and I felt like a fish out of water.”
Salvation came in the form of Hall, who whisked him off to Stratford to direct The Taming of the Shrew with Peggy Ashcroft and Peter O’Toole. Alas, Hall’s verdict was: “Total disaster.” Yet Barton recovered and began devising his anthologies, starting with The Hollow Crown (1961), based on the British monarchy, which enjoyed great success and toured as recently as 2005 with Donald Sinden. When Hall collapsed with exhaustion during The Wars of the Roses, the cast requested that Barton step up. He directed Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1965 and thereafter averaged about two Shakespeare plays a year until the early 1990s.
In 1968 Barton married Anne Righter (née Roesen), an American-born English academic who may have been the only person to know more about Shakespeare than he did. Until the late 1980s they lived in an Elizabethan manor near Stratford that was thought to be haunted by four ghosts, including that of Anne Whateley, said to be Shakespeare’s true love before Anne Hathaway announced that she was pregnant by the Bard. His wife predeceased him (obituary, November 27, 2013) and he is survived by his sister, Jennifer.
Although Barton claimed to have found The Wars of the Roses a torment, The Greeks (1980), a trilogy that he adapted from ten Greek plays, came quickly. Tantalus (2000), a ten-play dramatisation of the Trojan War from its origins to its aftermath, led to a Herculean row with Hall, who was directing with his son Edward. Hall Sr removed one of the original plays and tightened Barton’s narrative structure. Barton was furious. “I wrote the bloody thing,” he fumed in 2006. Barton continued to work with the RSC, becoming especially close to Doran, and the breach with Hall appeared to have been healed when they appeared together on stage at Stratford in 2010.
Occasionally he directed works by others, such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which he had directed at Cambridge in the 1950s with Ian McKellen and Margaret Drabble, but returned to with the RSC at the Barbican in 1988. He also reached out to a wider audience with Playing Shakespeare, a series for London Weekend Television in 1982.
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Having worked his way through much of the Shakespeare canon, Barton spent his later years advising the next generation of Shakespeareans, holding regular verse-speaking surgeries and offering counsel to directors. He was rarely seen without his baggy woollen cardigan, while behind his thick hedges of grizzly hair and beard a raffish grin could occasionally be spotted. Even by middle age this bear of a man had a shuffling gait and would waste little time in small talk. Once he opened a lecture about a Shakespeare play by declaring that he had no views, but asked if the audience had any questions.
He would rise at five in the morning to rewrite Shakespeare. Despite giving the impression of being otherworldly, Barton, who enjoyed a game of chess, was not beyond turning to the small box for light relief. “I watch The Bill on television,” he said. “It’s not a soap, but it’s very well acted, cunningly plotted and follows continuing characters.”
John Barton, CBE, theatre director, was born on November 26, 1928. He died on January 18, 2018, aged 89