Peter Wilson, starting out in university revue with Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, ended up as one of the leading theatre producers in the West End.
He transformed Susan Hill’s macabre thriller The Woman in Black (1987) – adapted by Robin Herford for Alan Ayckbourn’s theatre in Scarborough – into the second longest running play of all time, after The Mousetrap; and Stephen Daldry’s sensational 1992 National Theatre revival of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls into a repeat visitor (six years at the Garrick theatre) and a touring phenomenon, both in the UK and abroad, over the last 30 years.
Unlike Cameron Mackintosh, his exemplar and colleague in the musical theatre field, Wilson, who has died of cancer aged 72, was quiet and undemonstrative, a bear-like, affable presence, but with an extraordinary Mackintosh-like ability to make big things happen.
In 1983, after co-directing (with Peter James) Griff Rhys Jones in a brilliant performance as Charley’s Aunt at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and co-producing (with Duncan Weldon) Ben Kingsley as a guardedly electrifying Edmund Kean – a solo show that, in the wake of Kingsley’s breakthrough as Gandhi, went on to Broadway – he formed his own company, Peter Wilson Productions, in a small house in Brixton, south London.
As well as continuously producing since then, PW Productions expanded into West End offices, acted as general managers and accountants for more than 500 productions worldwide and, between 1985 and 2001, produced and managed the Mobil touring theatre, the UK’s longest running commercial sponsorship.
With Mobil in the 1990s, Wilson produced and sometimes directed revivals of Peter Shaffer’s Sleuth, Molière’s Tartuffe, Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular.
Maybe most importantly of all, he put down new roots in Norfolk in 1992 as he took over executive responsibility – and the programming – of the beautifully restored art deco Theatre Royal in Norwich, whose history on more or less the same site since the 18th century would make of the word “chequered” a mere euphemism.
Purchased by the city council in 1967, it was closed for refurbishment and reconstruction for five years until the charismatic but chaotic Irish entrepreneur Dick Condon had a go in 1972. Having put the theatre once more on the national map, Condon left after a “funding dispute” and the place closed again in 1990.
With a new trust, a new board, improved facilities and acoustics, and a wonderful blue and gold front-of-house – and Wilson in situ – the theatre reopened in November 1992 with a concert by the Syd Lawrence Orchestra. It has thrived ever since, even as Wilson’s reputation and influence in the region increased exponentially.
Through his contacts, industry and sunny “can do” personality, Wilson attracted Glyndebourne Opera, Northern Ballet, Matthew Bourne’s company, Edward Hall’s Propeller and the Royal Shakespeare Company, among many others, to the Norfolk showcase theatre.
In 1997 the Norwegian National Opera’s Ring Cycle, a huge success, triggered a local schools project in opera that still reverberates in the community. Wilson defrayed the costs by billeting the singers in his family home, Gresham Hall, a dilapidated 1906 mansion full of bats that he rented from the MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown.
He stayed at the Theatre Royal until 2016, during which time he increased the membership base to well over 10,000; supervised a £10m front-of-house renovation in 2007 (helped by a star-studded fundraiser performance of Twelfth Night starring the local celebrity Stephen Fry as Malvolio); led the management merger of the Theatre Royal with the long-established Norwich Playhouse – both remained separate charities, though the merger was not formalised until 2019; and established Stage Two, the theatre’s new learning and participation centre, in 2016.
Born in London, Peter was the third child of Sir Geoffrey Wilson, a much-travelled senior civil servant and a Quaker, and his musically inclined American wife, Judy (nee Trowbridge), daughter of a Broadway actor.
His childhood was spent shuttling between Washington and Westminster school where, in 1966, as Benjamin Stokes in a production of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, he ran around (with the future choreographer and director Martin Duncan), dodging peashooters blown vindictively at him by junior boys.
He took a degree in English at Exeter College, Oxford, but an expected career in law was subverted by his immersion in the new wave of revue performers. His own participation in that wave came to an abrupt halt when, in 1978, he appeared in a singularly bad wig and desperately unfunny revue – Beyond a Joke – at the Hampstead theatre, with Atkinson. “It’s very lonely being on stage with Rowan Atkinson,” he observed, wryly.
He decided there and then that his talents must lie offstage and backstage, as indeed it proved. Developing a crucial intimacy with the touring circuit, other companies and producers, he moved effortlessly into the middle of the action. He maintained a network of professional relationships that allowed him access to the best touring product for Norwich, and serious kudos in the West End.
His latest operations included the smash-hit revival of Dirty Dancing at the Dominion, a UK tour of a homage to Spike Milligan by Private Eye’s Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, and a beguiling eavesdrop on the secret conversations of Ava Gardner as performed by Elizabeth McGovern at the Riverside Studios.
Wilson was appointed MBE in 2000, and received a special award from Norfolk county council in 2005, an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia in 2017 and an appointment as vice lord lieutenant of Norfolk in 2020.
He was given a special Olivier award on the stage of the Fortune theatre in March, as his production of The Woman in Black completed its long run.
Peter married Clare Stanham, a stage manager and teacher, in 1981. They were divorced in 2000. Thereafter, he lived with the photographer Garlinda Birkbeck, who survives him, along with his children with Clare – Alex, Tim and Nichola – and two grandchildren, Kit and Aphra.
• Peter Stafford Wilson, producer, director and theatre manager, born 12 January 1951; died 4 September 2023
