David Gothard
David Gothard Bio
David Gothard graduated with an MA in Philosophy and African History from Edinburgh University during four years when student drama played an important part.
As a British Council post-graduate in Budapest, he directed pioneering and provocative productions of TS Eliot, Beckett and Pinter. He worked at the Royal Court Theatre, London, under the artistic directorship of Lindsay Anderson and William Gaskill.
He joined Riverside Studios in London in 1977 as Artistic Programmer under Peter Gill, during a seminal period: In the opening season were launched a now legendary “The Cherry Orchard” from Peter Gill, Athol Fugard’s work from South Africa, Miro’s first theatre collaboration since Diaghilev and Shuji Tereyama’s “Directions to Servants”.
Amongst the writers developed over the early years were Hanif Kureishi, Tunde Ikoli and David Drane. They and others showcased work through short-term repertory festivals of new work including the Plays Umbrella structure, which included Mustapha Matura, Edgar White, Peter Gill and Nicholas Wright. Directors launching their careers, often through informal performances, included Simon Usher, David Leveaux, Tina Packer, Stephen Daldry and Simon McBurney with a pioneering Complicite event.
American writers successfully introduced to Britain by David included Emily Mann, Naomi Wallace, David Hancock, winners of the 1995 and 1996 Obies, and Todd Ristau. Three of these he later directed.
The relationship between writing and film played an important part in David’s activities at Riverside, even before its 35mm cinema was built, much of it built on the initiative of Jan Dawson, his film colleague. With a 16mm screen suspended from the roof of one of the studios, Bill Forsyth, Peter Greenaway, Lazar Stoianovic, Rebecca O’Brien and Andrew
Eaton all developed the roots of their careers. In 1985, Andrei Tarkovsky found a home base there for the build-up for “The Sacrifice.” He ran a working committee for Tarkovsky as they both developed the possibility of “Hamlet ” as a film. Hanif Kureishi had worked in David’s office and their package containing the script of “My Beautiful Laundrette” propelled Stephen Frears and Tim Bevan into a shake-up of the British film scene.
In the late eighties, after leaving Riverside, David returned to Eastern Europe. In Yugloslavia he directed Howard Barker’s “The Castle” and then for fifteen months chaired an international committee on theatre projects involving leading companies from Hungary, Germany and Italy, including the representation of all the national groupings within
the former-Yugoslavia. During the war he returned to teach actors, writers and directors at the Slovenian Theatre and Film Academy and wrote a report on Slovenia’s potential participation in the cultural programme of the European Community.
In 1998 and 1999 he taught screenplay writing for the Soros Foundation in Ljubjana. Productions of “Hamlet”, then “Macbeth” re-launching the National Theatre of Kosova, were initiated with David directing while he was president of the jury at the Sarajevo Festival in autumn 1998. Early in 1999, David returned to Budapest to the Merlin Theatre where he directed an experimental based on Ted Hughes’”Crow” and the work of Janos Pilinsky and Sheryl Sutton.
In 1988 David was awarded the first Kingman Brewster Theatre Fellowship of the British American Arts and workshopped new writing in the USA, giving seminars on Tarkovski and new British film at Columbia University. He was based at the Actors Studio in New York and at the National Theatre in Washington DC. In the late eighties he also
introduced the Frankfurt Ballet, Miro’s “Mori el Merma” and the theatre work of Andrzej Wajda to America at the Pepsico Summerfare festival at Purchase, upstate New York.
He returned to London to commission first-time directors and writers for a series of shorts for Channel 4. He then continued his working association with Hanif Kureishi as a producer on “London Kills Me”.
David has regularly been invited on to the jury of the Playwrights’ Festival and to teach at the Playwrights’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. There he helped initiate a team of writers to form a company for touring new plays in the mid-west. His own directing of David Hancock’s “Ark Tattoo” came to New York. In November, 1998, he directed a workshop
of a new play, “In the Sweat”, by two Iowa writers, Naomi Wallace and Bruce McLeod, for a youth project at the National Theatre. In the summer of 2003 he directed a new play by Brian Tuttle in Columbus, Ohio and an open air production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in the park. In 2005 he directed a second Tuttle play in Boston
David is a member of the judging committee for the George Devine Award for new playwriting and the Jan Dawson and Katrin Carlidge’s awards for independent film. He teaches directors as a guest at the National Film and Television School.
In January 2007, he became Associate Artist at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and is preparing a production at the Kasser Theatre in Montclair, based on New Jersey artists, William Carlos Williams, Robert Smithson, George Segal, Leroi Jones and Allen Ginsberg.
He regularly teaches student directors on writing at the National Film School and at Birkbeck in the University of London.