Sir Michael Boyd, who was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) between 2003 and 2012, has died aged 68.
Boyd’s tenure at the RSC helped rejuvenate the organisation after the rocky stewardship of his predecessor Adrian Noble. It also saw him direct a cycle of eight of Shakespeare’s historical plays in the space of just two years, a process he admitted left him exhausted but satisfied.
A statement from Boyd’s family said: “Theatre director Michael Boyd has died from cancer. His career took him from training in Moscow to artistic directorships at the Tron theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.”
Born in Belfast in 1955, Boyd wasn’t a regular theatregoer as a child. Yet, inspired by seeing Alastair Sim as Captain Hook and Laurence Olivier in The Merchant of Venice, he found himself drawn to the idea of creating worlds different to his own.
In 1979, he received a British Council fellowship to go to Moscow as a trainee director at the Malaya Bronnaya theatre. Speaking to the Guardian in 2014, he said: “It was an inspiration to sit in rehearsal rooms in an unfree society, seeing how theatre artists responded.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing. His staging of Blood and Ice by Liz Lochhead received a review that said: “I would rather go to the dentist than sit through this 90 minutes again.”
If it stung, Boyd soon overcame it, working successfully at Coventry’s Belgrade theatre and Sheffield’s Crucible before becoming artistic director of the Tron theatre, in Glasgow’s East End, in 1985. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996.
The current co-artistic directors of the RSC, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, said: “Michael’s tenure and work were hugely inspiring and influential. His vision and leadership are still deeply felt in the company and in the wider world of British and international theatre.”
