Barrie Rutter

Billing, Christian M.

Abstract

© 2008 John Russell Brown. All rights reserved. At first, any activity that extended his hours away from home appealed; as he grew older, however, it was performance that attracted most. During the 1964 academic session, he was cast as Macbeth in a school production and discovered his acumen for acting. He subsequently joined the National Youth Theatre, for whom he played Nipple in Little Malcolmand His Struggle against the Eunuchs at the Royal Court and Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Despite a difficult training period at Glasgow’s Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Rutter’s talent was such that in 1968 he had written for him thepart of Douglas Bagley in Peter Tierson’s television drama The Apprentices. A career in professional performance thus began on a high, and he worked successfully during the early 1970s as a jobbing actor in theatre, one-off television dramas and a number of well-known situation comedies before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1975. At the RSC, largely as a result of the class-and region-based prejudices of the Cambridge-educated élite that ran the institution atthat time, he performed in a variety of only minor roles until he left in 1980 – when a mixture of frustration at being habitually overlooked for major Shakespearian parts and an opportunity to engage in more genuinely experimental theatre practice led him to join the National Theatre (NT) in London. It was here that he met the man who was to become the greatest influence over his subsequent career and artistic philosophy: Leeds-born poet and intellectual Tony Harrison. Harrison gave Rutter significant roles in all three of his NT productions: The Oresteia (dir. Hall, 1981), The Mysteries (dir. Bryden, 1985) and The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (dir. Harrison, 1990), shows written expressly to celebrate the poetic rhythm and expressive beauty of the northern voice. It was in the last such production that Rutter experienced the events that led him to found his own company and to become a director of Shakespeare. Like many tales in the history of theatre, the story is one of coincidence and accident.

Citation

Billing, C. M. (2009). Barrie Rutter. In J. R. Brown (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare (389-406). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203932520-28

• Online Publication Date: Jun 2, 2009
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2009
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 389-406
• Series Title: Routledge Companions
• Book Title: The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare
• ISBN: 9781134146482; 0415400449; 9780415400442 ; 9780415577670
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203932520-28
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/400327
• Contract Date: Mar 19, 2008