My friend Barrie Hesketh, who has died aged 91, was an actor, writer and artist who in 1966 co-founded the Mull Little theatre on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides.
Barrie and his then wife, Marianne, had moved to Mull in 1963 with their three young sons, and were running their home as a guest house. The after-dinner entertainment the couple provided proved popular and, as demand grew, they set about transforming the adjacent cowshed into a small theatre.
For their two-person productions, Barrie found inventive ways to adapt classics. Repertoire included plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Strindberg and Shaw, specially commissioned contemporary work by the Scottish writer Iain Crichton Smith, and original material written by the Heskeths. The couple took their productions on tour, across Britain and Europe.
Barrie was born in Erdington, Birmingham, the only child of Doris (nee Sutcliffe) and Donald Hesketh, but grew up in the Peak District, where his father ran the village shop in Flash, outside Buxton. Barrie attended Buxton college, excelling in art, then trained as an actor at Central School of Speech and Drama, in London.
There, Barrie met fellow student Marianne Richards, and they married in 1954, a year after graduation. His career began in weekly rep, with Caryl Jenner Touring Productions and Manchester Library Theatre Company, and as an actor and presenter for Granada and ABC TV.
In 1960 he accepted a position with the Scottish Community Drama Association, in the course of which a visit to Mull inspired the family’s relocation.
Among the audience on Mull one evening was the senior tutor at Churchill College, Cambridge, who was so impressed that he invited the couple to spend a term doing whatever they chose to enrich college life. I was an undergraduate there when they arrived in 1979. As a director Barrie was creative, playful, and generous with us, his student cast and crew.
In 1983, the Heskeths were both appointed MBE. Following Marianne’s death from cancer in 1984, Barrie was again invited to Churchill College. It was then that he met Philippa Comber, a psychologist and the college counsellor, who became his partner.
Having directed a final season on Mull, Barrie left the island in 1986 and joined Philippa in East Anglia. His focus shifted to writing: the autobiographical Taking Off (1997); a collection of unpublished essays, An Actor’s Take on the Psychology of Shakespeare; and plays including a monologue, The New Prometheus (1987), which he performed in New York, Berlin and Cambridge.
Barrie and Philippa settled in Manchester in 1999. Communicating his love of Shakespeare, Barrie directed young actors at Altrincham Club theatre during 2003 and lectured in 2016 at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, in London. A talented and prolific painter, he was still at work in his 80s.
When Parkinson’s disease and an associated dementia made daily life increasingly difficult, Barrie moved to a care home in Cheshire in 2018. There, in 2020, he and Philippa married.
Barrie is survived by Philippa, his sons, Richard, Nicholas and James, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
