Ebullient, pugnacious, larger than life. No single adjective is sufficient to describe the tumultuous, impossible talent of the director Mike Bradwell, who has died aged 76.
The success of the Hull Truck Theatre company that he founded in 1971 led, eventually, to the great success of Hull’s year as the European city of culture in 2017.
His adopted home theatre in London was the Bush, a small room above a bustling Shepherd’s Bush pub, where he continued an extraordinary powerhouse operation in British playwriting, succeeding Dominic Dromgoole as artistic director from 1996 to 2007.
The playwright David Edgar averred that Bradwell was “a giant of the alternative theatre some of us were privileged to grow up in”. While the film director Mike Leigh, with whom he trained on the director’s course at the East 15 Acting School in Essex, said that “his unique achievement in creating ‘devised plays’ was to integrate his own songs into the action in a delightfully idiosyncratic way”.
As Bradwell explained in an article marking Hull Truck’s 50th anniversary, in 2022, he moved to Hull in 1971 because it was the most unlikely place in the world to start an experimental theatre company – “plus rents were cheap and social security were unlikely to find us any proper jobs. I was 23 and I believed that theatre could change the world. I still do. I wanted to make uncompromising, provocative, funny, tough, sexy plays about people you didn’t see in plays, for people who didn’t go to the theatre. I wanted Hull Truck to be a nuisance.”
Combative confrontation – as I knew only too well as a critic and contemporary of his – was second nature to Bradwell. He set up shop in Hull in a cold, damp squat, 71 Coltman Street, where his improvisations on sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in a communal living and rehearsal place were celebrated in a 2017 play by Richard Bean. There is now a blue plaque on the house once occupied by feral cats and long-haired, semi-starving, sometimes stoned, always underpaid actors. Hull Truck was a lifestyle choice of community engagement.
They toured their plays around the theatres and community centres of Manchester and Yorkshire, meeting no reaction to speak of until the Guardian critic Robin Thornber acclaimed their third production, The Knowledge, the day after it was pulled – on grounds of alleged obscenity – from the Wythenshawe Forum in Manchester in June 1974.
One scene from the next show, Bridget’s House, in 1976, caused a furore when a character played by Rachel Bell observed that most men wouldn’t know what a clitoris was if it jumped up and bit them on the leg. By now they were on a roll. They played the Bush in London, and Kenneth Tynan, no less, enthused about both the play and Bell.
“The bargain of real, proper theatre,” said Bradwell, “is when a group of human beings on stage get together with a group of human beings in the audience to fearlessly celebrate their human being-ness.”
He liked to say he was born in a pigsty near Doncaster – on a pig farm owned by his father’s family, though his father himself, Frederick Bradwell, was a potato and vegetable farmer in the village of Epworth, near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. His mother, Olive (nee Johnson), worked in the box office at the Darlington civic theatre.
After an unhappy time as a boarder at Canford school in Dorset (whose alumni include the artist and film director Derek Jarman and the novelist Alan Hollinghurst), he joined the Scunthorpe Youth theatre in 1966 and took a holiday job – his first professional appointment – as a stagehand on a pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln. His younger sister, Christine, was also in the youth theatre; she went on to run the Anvil Arts centre in Basingstoke.
Bradwell belongs to the tradition of rough-house contemporary theatre that stretches from the Elizabethans and Jacobeans through Joan Littlewood and Ken Campbell, bypassing the monolithic National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.
His friendship and association with Leigh led to him appearing as a risible, guitar-strumming hippie in Leigh’s beautiful, melancholic stage play Bleak Moments (at the Open Space in Tottenham Court Road in 1970), then, a year later, in the film of the same name – Leigh’s first, funded by his fellow Salfordian Albert Finney – which was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a masterpiece of quiet suburban anomie.
His other adventures in showbusiness, as recounted in his glorious memoir The Reluctant Escapologist (2010), witnessed the onstage mass love-ins of the Living Theatre at the Roundhouse in the 1960s; teaching Bob Hoskins how to eat fire; becoming an escapologist (reluctantly) in the Ken Campbell Roadshow; and doing battle with health and safety inspectors in his 10 years running the Bush.
Hull Truck relaxed its aggressive counterculture default setting – probably not a good thing – when they settled in 1983 in a delightful 150-seater converted church hall, the Spring Street theatre, under the artistic directorship of the playwright John Godber (who riled Bradwell, the bolshie beatnik, when, on the Terry Wogan TV show, he said he wanted to do theatre his mum and dad would like).
The company became even more respectable when, in 2009, they moved into a £15m new home in Ferensway, Hull, funded by the Arts Council, Hull city council and the European regional development fund. The venue remains a thriving and going concern.
Bradwell, meanwhile, ploughed his own furrow. When he left Hull Truck in 1981, Robert Cushman in the Observer saluted his 10 years there as “the richest, sharpest and funniest work in the British theatre”.
Bradwell became an associate director at the Royal Court (1984-86). At the Bush from 1996, he directed no less than 40 plays in 10 years, including work by Jack Thorne, David Eldridge, Georgia Fitch, Joe Penhall, Doug Lucie and Terry Johnson.
Between 1991 and 2003, Bradwell directed three rollicking plays by the Mamma Mia! author Catherine Johnson, another of his proteges; Resident Alien, a wonderful Quentin Crisp monologue written by Tim Fountain and performed by Bette Bourne (“Life is a funny thing that happens to you on the way to the grave”); and a heartwarming musical play about a close-harmony singing group in a small mining village near Doncaster, The Glee Club, by another of his significant proteges, Richard Cameron.
He first met his future life partner, the actor and playwright Helen Cooper, when working as dialogue coach on Campbell’s sensational 24-hour epic, The Warp (1979), at the ICA in the Mall; she was dancing to Ravel’s Bolero.
They got together in 1983, and he directed two fascinating plays of hers about the forgotten wives of famous figures, real and literary: Mrs Gauguin (1984), at the Almeida in Islington, and Mrs Vershinin (1988), the unseen suicidal wife of the flirtatious battery commander in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith.
Helen survives him, as do their daughter, Flora, a grandson, Beau, and his sister, Christine.
• Michael John Bradwell, theatre director, born 14 June 1948; died 7 April 2025
