I feel very honoured to be asked to speak today, but also a bit daunted.
I realise that I first met John more than 40 years ago, way back in 1981 when he was encouraging to me as a student director and helped me on my first steps into the business.
And I’ve always thought of him as a big brother whose approval mattered to me.
So I’d better not screw this up.
In thinking about what to say today, I settled on a few key words and phrases which I hope will catch something of what John stood for, as a director, teacher and champion of new writing for the theatre.
The first is:
1. Knowledge
John was extraordinarily, amazingly knowledgeable.
It was fascinating watching him collaborating with his lifelong friend and colleague, the great director and playwright Peter Gill: Peter understood everything about the play intuitively, but it was John who knew the facts. It was like watching the two sides of the brain.
And John was by far the best-read person I’ve ever known, always clutching a thick volume from the London Library. I can’t count the number of books he recommended to me but it says something that the last two were the Diaries of Count Harry Kessler and the Journals of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.
Which takes me to my second word:
2. International
The world is wide and John embraced it.
He spoke fluent French and excellent German and despite his commitment to the Englishness of the English tradition his admiration for the best of the German theatre—Brecht and Peter Stein—and the three months he spent with Roger Planchon at the Theatre Nationale Populaire, shaped his tastes in more ways than he was happy to admit.
I remember John joking that the English theatre rediscovered the European drama in a fit of excitement every ten years: for John it was a constant. He was a true European.
3. Classicism
John studied classics at Cambridge and in 2005 wrote the Faber Guide to Greek and Roman Drama. Unlike most of us, he read the plays in the original and his comments on the various translations are pithy: ‘To be avoided’ is one of my favourites. The book is terrific.
John directed Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg at the National and commissioned translations of Calderon, Moliere, Marivaux, Goethe and others.
For John, who was brought up near Stratford-upon-Avon, the classics were to be enjoyed unselfconsciously: their qualities might be strange, the world they describe alien, but they are part of the air that we breathe.
He directed Richard III in Iceland and knew his Shakespeare inside out.
And, of course, the next word is:
4. Playwrights
In a time when the theatre hails the director, the designer or the leading actor as the primary creative force, John championed the playwright. His theatre was a writers’ theatre.
From his early years at the Open Space and the Riverside Studios in the 1970s to his time as Associate Director at the NT Studio and Head of New Writing at the National in the 1980s and 1990s, his work with living playwrights lay at the heart of everything he did.
The number of dramatists he discovered, helped, challenged, commissioned and championed is astonishing. And if I don’t try to list them all, it’s because we don’t have the time and I’ll forget someone remarkable. You can find out more from his website.
John’s teaching of emerging playwriting is, perhaps his greatest legacy. The playwriting group he ran at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton between 2000 and 2012 was extraordinary and the much-loved John Burgess Play Writing Course was in its 14th year when he died. It’s a mark of his unique qualities that it’s impossible to imagine anyone being able to reproduce what he offered.
Some of John’s playwrights are here today to pay their respects and others who have sent their apologies. I know they all know how lucky they were to have worked with John.
5. Speak the Speech
I remember John once telling me that you could tell whether a play was any good by reading the first couple of pages. If the dialogue had crackle, if it flew off the page into the mouth of the actor, the play was likely to be good, whatever happened in the plot.
But if it didn’t, well, why bother?
And so it was revealing to read the ‘basic building blocks’ of John’s play writing course: ‘Words of one syllable, rhythm, exits and entrances, building a page, surprise, stichomythia, images, actions, silence.’
Energy. Truth. Simplicity.
Which takes me to the sixth word:
6. Politics
John was an intensely political person, shaped by the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. He despaired of the venality, incompetence and cruelty of generations of Tories and canvassed for progressive politics to the end.
But his understanding of politics went far beyond party politics.
Despite—or perhaps because of—all his learning, John’s vision was of a theatre which engaged with the everyday, gave a platform to forgotten voices and challenged the status quo.
Let me offer three glimpses:
The Garden of England in 1985 at the height of the Miners’ Strike with the Cottesloe (as it was then called) crammed to the rafters with Kent Miners and their families: ‘coal not dole’ stickers wherever you looked.
Black Poppies in 1987, a documentary drama about black soldiers in the British army.
Debbie Horsfield’s and Sarah Daniels’ brilliant plays at the National about working-class women in the 1980s and 1990s: it’s an intriguing fact that John directed more plays by women than any other male director at the National Theatre.
John opened the stage door and let real life flood in, in all its contradiction. The modern theatre could learn from his example.
And so my last word is the most important:
7. Humanity
John was in some ways an old-fashioned English moralist. And all the better for it.
He wasn’t interested in the usual rewards of the profession and his career had its downs as well as its ups. He was never the toast of fashionable London and to an extent operated in the shadows. He despised snobbery and unearned status, and was as likely to be seen in a tiny fringe theatre in Balham as at the National.
What mattered to John, I think, was the quality, the living energy, the human truth of what was being shown. Anything else was, as he’d sometimes say, a waste of an evening.
In brief then, John thought that the theatre should tell the truth about how people live their lives. It should bear witness to humanity. It should help us see the world more clearly and so, perhaps, live better lives.
Those of us who knew John and were lucky enough to walk with him will always remember his brilliant mind and intellectual curiosity, his sharp wit and his wry smile, his undying loyalty to those he respected and his crisp critique of those he didn’t, but, above all, his friendship, decency and unquestioning instinct for kindness.
Farewell, dear John.
May your memory be a blessing