Leonard Tucker, who has died aged 94, was one of the British theatre’s leading lighting designers and the first lighting manager at the National Theatre. He joined Laurence Olivier in that capacity at the Old Vic in 1963 and continued under Peter Hall when the NT moved on to the South Bank in 1976.
His career followed the rapid developments in technology in the 1970s, the age of computerised lighting boards and the haphazard application of video and CGI visual effects, though he was distinctly “old school” in this area.
A lot of the most positive innovations were instigated by Richard Pilbrow’s company Theatre Projects, but Tucker spent his creative life with Sadler’s Wells after the second world war, the Old Vic, the National and, from 1985, when he was made redundant by Hall in the wake of severe Arts Council cuts – and the Cottesloe auditorium was closed in protest – the West End. Until that break, Tucker had supervised a lighting crew of 21 technicians across the three NT theatres.
The second youngest of eight siblings, Tucker was born in Islington, north London, to Arthur, a metal polisher who had fought with the machine gun corps in the first world war, and his wife, Agnes (nee Newland), a book-folder as the pages came off the presses.
He was educated in an Islington secondary school and made pocket money as a choir boy – he had a good ear for music and was a talented, self-taught pianist – and overcame the difficulties of being born blind in one eye, and asthmatic.
He first went to work – after being briefly evacuated during the war – in 1943 at a nearby radio factory but found more amenable employment at the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward) in St Martin’s Lane, laying the fires in the offices and polishing the brass around the building. He joined the stage crew by night, aged 16, as a junior electrician.
His first show in that legendary 1944 Old Vic company season led by Olivier and Ralph Richardson was Olivier’s Richard III. He was responsible for the ghostly green lighting that accompanied the phantoms’ visit on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. One of the lights had burnt out, and he replaced it with the first “green” he could find.
“Waiting in the wings,” said Tucker, “Larry looked at the spot, then looked at me, and I knew I’d been sussed. There was only the most subtle change of shade, but he knew the difference.”
In 1945 he went to Sadler’s Wells as a junior electrician under the artistic directorship of Tyrone Guthrie and treasured particularly his time working on the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. His time at the Wells was interrupted by national service, when he was conscripted in 1948 into the army pay corps.
He was back at the Vic in 1954 as chief electrician – most of the shows at that time were lit by the artistic director, Michael Benthall. But when Pilbrow came in to light Val May’s production of Richard II in 1959, he helped devise a more complex system than just a number one spot bar, and he found a “pageant” – a light with no spill rays – to hang behind a backcloth in order to create an effect of the sun, rising and setting, a crucial image in that play.
The News Chronicle acclaimed “the best lighting at the Vic in some time” and “Little Len” (he was only 5ft 4in tall – and was also known as Len or Lennie) forged a firm friendship with Pilbrow. He was a founder member in 1961 of Pilbrow’s society of British lighting designers, precursor of today’s association of lighting designers (ALD) with over 700 members, including honorary Americans.
After the breakup of Olivier’s marriage to Vivien Leigh, Leigh toured in 1961 with the Old Vic – including Tucker, as lighting supremo – to America, Australia and New Zealand in La Dame aux Camélias and Twelfth Night. Val Webber, who had joined the Vic in 1960 as an assistant stage manager, was also assigned to the tour, and she and Leonard married in Sydney, and in secret, in October 1961.
Back at the Vic, Olivier founded the National Theatre – “the most specific technician of any director I ever met,” said Tucker – and demanded as much from the crew around him as he did from himself; “he basked in my spotlight, and I basked in his,” he added.
The unforgettable productions he lit there included Franco Zeffirelli’s Sicilian Much Ado About Nothing with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens; Olivier’s Othello, directed by John Dexter; and Michael Blakemore’s brilliant production of The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which signalled an NT elision from the Old Vic to the South Bank.
Olivier called his wizard electrician “Old Tucker who lights the actors”, and that is what he did, though he had absorbed lessons from the Berliner Ensemble’s visit to the Old Vic in 1965 with their 3D lighting of textured stone and brick buildings and theatrical use of vivid colours – in contrast to the Royal Court’s misinterpretation of Brechtian lighting as flat and white, like an insipid new coffee.
In 1984 he co-designed the lighting of 42nd Street with the master lighting designer of the 1940s and 50s, Joe Davis, the go-to lights man for the once dominant West End producers HM Tennent. Davis died mid-rehearsals and Tucker took over at the driving seat for this musical theatre razzle-dazzle smash hit.
Subsequently, after he left the NT, he amassed a total of more than 100 West End credits, including crucial collaborations with the director Harold Pinter and designer Eileen Diss on the plays of Simon Gray; Maggie Smith in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (1994); Pauline Collins in a perfect Simon Callow revival of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine (1988); and, earlier, Alec Guinness in Alan Bennett’s The Old Country (1977).
His last lighting gig was a 2008 production of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen at the Royal Academy of Music, conducted by Charles Mackerras, with whom he had worked at Sadler’s Wells in 1948.
Tucker, renowned as a great problem-solver, both on the stage and in the home, lived happily in Beckenham, Kent, with Val, who returned later in life to the NT as a wardrobe assistant. He was predeceased by Val, who died in 2021, and survived by their children, James, an actor, and Alison, who is a secretary for the West End producer Michael Codron.
• Arthur Leonard Tucker, theatrical lighting designer, born 8 August 1928; died 11 June 2023
