Derek Tomlin Goldby (1940 – 9 January 2022) was an Australian-born theatre director who has worked internationally, particularly in Canada, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the United States and France.
Early life
Derek Goldby was born in Adelaide[1] but when he was five years old, his family returned to the UK. They had moved from Cambridge in 1937 for his father to take up an academic post in Adelaide, but returned in 1945 to London. Here Derek attended Dulwich College in London and Caius College in Cambridge, England. While at Caius, he directed a production of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen which led to his first professional job as Assistant Director at the Royal Court Theatre in London. [citation needed]
Work in Britain
He left the Royal Court Theatre after one year to direct a repertory season at Barrow-in-Furness, which was followed by a season at Harrogate Theatre. The following two years he directed free-lance productions at Dundee, Bristol and Sheffield Repertory Companies, as well as at Stratford-on-Avon. In 1963, Goldby directed Chips with Everything, then produced Twelfth Night and Tons of Money at Her Majesty's, Barrow.[2] Altogether, he directed 150 productions in these regional towns, including the English language premiere of Berthold Brecht's A day in the life of the great scholar Wu.[1]
In 1966, Goldby became an assistant director to John Dexter at the National Theatre of Great Britain (now the Royal National Theatre) and worked on The Storm and Much Ado About Nothing. At age 25, he became the youngest director that the National Theatre had had up to that time when he directed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by the then mostly unknown Tom Stoppard. At that point, the play had been performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but it was Goldby's 1967 National Theatre production at the Old Vic that brought the play to international attention.[3]
Work in the United States
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead went on to play on Broadway, where it was nominated for eight Tony Awards and received four, including Best Play. Goldby went on to direct several other productions on Broadway, including Loot by Joe Orton,[4] and Her First Roman, a musical based on George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (for which Goldby was brought in late in rehearsals as a replacement director).[5][6]
Goldby never married. He died on 9 January 2022, at the age of 81.[13]
Thoughts on theatre and audiences
"I enjoy directing. Since I was 16, I always knew I'd be a director."[14]
"I still enjoy working on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It's still interesting because of what each new cast of actors brings to it. The text has in many ways the polished surface of metal. The values are verbal, like the plays of Wilde and Shaw, really. So I'm fascinated to see how actors respond to the challenge of the play. It has its own unique laws—unlike any other play in dramatic literature. Some people hate it."[14]
"Orton is our best social satirist since Jonathan Swift. 'Loot' tears apart the whole mystique of respectability and death, and does it with laughs. If Broadway audiences aren't sophisticated enough to accept it then there's no hope for the theatre here...I couldn't expect your establishment critics to like it. After all, it's a left-wing play in a right-wing country."[15]
"It's not that I don't believe in the theatre of shock, or the theatre of purpose, or the theatre of whatever. It's that I think we all need to be reminded of what people go to the theatre for. People go to the theatre basically—young and old—for an experience they can't get anywhere else. They want to laugh and cry."[16]
References
^ abcMuch of this early information comes from Goldby's thumbnail biographical sketches appearing in the programs for the Broadway production of Her First Roman and Loot.
^"Higher Education Helps," The Stage (28 February 1963).
