Toby Robertson obituary

Director

Prospect Theatre Company, he encouraged the great figures of the British scene

Toby Robertson, who has died aged 83, was the artistic director of the Prospect Theatre Company from 1964 to 1978, and restored the name and reputation of the theater tour in the United Kingdom after Kingdom, it became synonymous with the second class tattiness 1950. Large and enthusiastic, with a seasoning Falstaffian him, Robertson was an exuberant character, buccaneer, earning the respect not only of his immediate colleagues, but also of the Arts Council and Cambridge home theater god, George Rylands.

Rylands, at King's College and friend of EM Forster, was an active sponsor of the Company and President of the Marlowe Theatre Arts in the city, and Robertson was one of many notable alumni - to Others were Peter Hall, John Barton, Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen -. which, as college graduates Cavalier and Marlowe, renewed British theater, round head with his rival in the "new writing", at the home of the Royal Audience

Barton Hall and the game Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre under new Laurence Olivier prospered. Meanwhile, Robertson and his colleagues - director Richard Cottrell and director Iain Mackintosh, who had thrown together in perspective Theatre Oxford in 1961 - pioneered a type of flexible, well-played and well-dressed classical theater. The drawings were minimal, so that the company could play Sunderland Empire Theatre one night and the Georgia Real close to Richmond, North Yorkshire, next.

While McKellen and Jacobi were fairly well known at the national level was the prospect that their Jacobi played Hamlet and Ivanov, innovative and sensational performances McKellen Richard II (directed by Cottrell) and Edward II Marlowe (led by Robertson) at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969. The last two touring productions in the UK and Europe before settling in London and the siren to break records at the box office in Piccadilly.

Robertson led the company with a mixture of arrogance and good old-fashioned bravado tempered by the cunning, and the list of actors was a tribute to his powers of persuasion: Eileen Atkins, Prunella Scales, Timothy West Barbara Jefford, John Turner and Robert Eddison were all involved, and gave excellent performances in the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dryden, John Vanbrugh and Gogol. Prospect famous productions included Cottrell adaptation of Forster, A Room with a View, The Cherry Orchard starring Lila Kedrova,. And staging magnificent Turgenev A Month in the Country, with Jacobi and western flanking an impressive performance from Dorothy Tutin

more than 10 years, appeared in eight festivals in Edinburgh Prospect, mounting 16 productions, 13 of them are in London. But things started to go wrong when the company sought a base at the Old Vic in 1977 and there was confusion as to whether this violates the terms of his allowance on tour.

Robertson cooked Arts Council Palace-backed coup in 1980, while he was abroad with the company in China. He never recovered from this disappointment and quarreled with the West, his successor at the Old Vic, who had worked with the prospect of 16 years.

son of Lambert David Robertson, a naval officer, and his wife, Felicity Douglas, playwright, Robertson was educated at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Sholto was baptized, but he became known as "Toby," he said, after reciting "To be or not to be" at an early age. He did his military service in East Africa guns and boasted one hand quell an uprising of the Mau Mau.

He appeared in a production of the Marlowe Society of Romeo and Juliet at the Phoenix in London in 1952, and Elizabethan players (led by Barton) Richard II in Kidderminster in 1954. He appeared to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957 Peter Brook production of The Tempest with John Gielgud (who also little studied) and made his professional debut in London The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, directed by Peter Wood, both in the theater the following year.

worked in television between 1959 and 1963, directing over 25 new parts, wheelchair and more from the BBC ITV Thurs Wednesday. Brook has also helped him in his 1963 film The Lord of the Flies. In 1962, Robertson ordered Gorky's Lower Depths of the CBC. He met his future wife, the actor and screenwriter Jane McCulloch, when heard in the theater Pitlochry. They married in 1964 and settled in Spencer Park, Wandsworth Common. "It Svengali-ed me," said the youngest McCulloch, who had participated in the 1957 production of The Tempest with his father, a vicar in Warwick, and rounded picture of Robertson in the program - still - with the caption "handsome."

Robertson gave his dramatic (and financially rewarding) career in television Prospect, was fully committed to the ideals of the tour. Music has played an increasing role, with Carl Davis to compose a score for a great Pericles was established in 1973 largely on the brothel in Mytilene, and Donald Fraser (including McCulloch began an affair which has contributed to the degradation of marriage) Christopher Logue notation war in 1977.

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