Steven Pimlott - A Celebration
18 April 1953 - 14 February 2007
Memorial Concert
A celebration of the life and work of the director Steven Pimlott was held 17 May 2007, Olivier Theatre, RNT, London
Brief note on the service, A Pollard
The memorial was not only beautiful and emotional but touched with laughter, the opening footage that he'd shot hurtling around a rollercoaster fitted the occasion wonderfully. Many spoke of his love of life and his passion, Declan Donnellan said of him, "he was the most alive person I ever knew". Everyone who spoke testified that Steven not only seemed to inspire love amongst everyone, but also in whatever he was producing.
Samual West performing the speech from Richard II, brought back memories. Nicholas Hytner lovingly spoke of his friends, enthusiasm, passion and love of fun to the backdrop of school and college photos that not only brought laughter but a lump to the throat.
By the end of the beautifully sung 'The Journey Home', across the auditorium tears could be seen slowy falling. By the end of 'Move On' movingly performed by Philip Quast and Maria Freedman, there wasn't many dry eyes in the the place.
Philip Quast was fortunate and blessed to not only have worked with Steven once but twice. First in 1990 in superb production og 'Sunday in the Park with George' at the RNT London, for which not only did Philip receive his first Olivier Award but received the Olivier Award for best musical. Second in 2003 in superbly thought-through production of Chechov's 'The Seagul' as part of the Chichester Festival season.
Steven's wife Daniela and their childrens loss is immeasurable, and I doubt there wasn't a heart or soul touched by her perfomance of 'Suleika' by F. Schubert.
This memorial was both fitting and wonderful celebration to Steven Pimlott.
| ROLLER-COASTER RIDE Film footage shot by Steven Pimlott | MEERA SYAL |
| HELEN COOPER 'So Many Different Lenghts of Time' by Pablo Neruda/Brian Patten | STEPHEN RAHMAN-HUGHES & RAZA JAFFREY 'The Journey Home' from Bombay Dreams. Accompanied by Chris Nightingale |
| PUFFIN ENSEMBLE W.A. Mozart: Gran Partita Serenade (Adagio) | MARIA FRIEDMAN & PHILIP QUAST 'Move On' from Sunday in the Park with George |
| SAMUEL WEST from Richard II | JASON CARR Music from Vieux Carré |
| PHOEBE PIMLOTT (piano) 'Why?' by Pam Wedgewood | ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER |
| MARIA EWING from Bizet's Carmen | NICOLAS COLICOS 'One More Angel in Heaven' from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat |
| TOM CAIRNS | STEVEN PIMLOTT: A life in pictures Created by Peter Mumford Poulenc's Oboe Sonata played by Richard Hewitt |
| FIONA DUNN, SOPHIE LOUISE DANN, NUALA WILLIS & CHRISTOPHER BLADES Gilbert and Sullivan Medley | IN HIS OWN WORDS Talking with Penny Cliff; filmed by Stephen White |
| PHILIP BARTLE, NICHOLAS HYTNER, DECLAN DONNELLAN School and Cambridge (with photos) | DANIELA BECHLY 'Suleika' by F. Schubert. Accompanied by Christiane Behn |
| EDWARD KEMP Poems | 'MICHAEL FEAST from Nathan the Wise |
| JEREMY SAMS Waltz from Ring Around The Moon | CHORUS 'You'll Never Walk Alone' from Carousel |
Musicians: Jason Carr & Michael Haslam (piano), Helen Keen (Flute), Mark
Lacey (Clarinet), Megan Pound (Violin), Penny Cliff (Cello), Steve McManus
(Double Bass)
The Pimlott Foundation, Steven had a great enthusiasm for live music and its performance in East Anlia, where he lived. The Charity will promote concerts throughout East Anglia, where Steven Pimlott lived, and beyond, using professional musicians and those keen to enter the profession.
Donations can be sent to:
- PIMLOTT FOUNDATION
- The Treasurer: Kirstin Davey,
- Rockalls Hall, Polstead, Essex, CO6 5AT
Biography:
Steven Pimlott's work and career has been not only been varied, but pushed and crossed boundries.
Pimlott joined the newly-formed Opera North in 1978, where he directed new productions of La Boheme, Nabucco, Tosca, Der Freischutz, The Bartered Bride, Werther, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci and the British Premier of Prince Igor, which he also translated with David Lloyd Jones. More recently his opera work in this country includes La Boheme and The Coronation of Poppea for ENO and the World Premier of Param Vir's opera Ion for Almeida Opera.
His international opera productions include Don Giovanni (Victoria State Opera), Manon Lescaut (Australian Opera), La Traviata (New Israeli Opera), Macbeth (Hamburg). His arena production of Carmen has been aired in Earl's Court (1988), Tokyo, Melbourne, Sydney, Birmingham, Dortmund, Zurich, Munich and Berlin.
After early theatre productions in Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds he became an Associate of the RSC where he directed many Shakespeare productions including Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Richard III, As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard II and Hamlet, as well as TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Tennessee Williams' Camino Real, Moliere's The Learned Ladies and the World Premières of Michael Hastings' Unfinished Business and Robert Holman's Bad Weather. Subsequently he became Artistic Director of The Other Place (1998-2001).
His work in musical theatre includes Sunday in thePark With George (National Theatre. Olivier Award for Best Musical), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (London Palladium, Canada, Australia and USA, subsequently filmed with Donny Osmond), Dr Dolittle (Labatt's Apollo, Hammersmith) and Bombay Dreams (West End and on Broadway).
At Chichester 2003 he directed The Master and Margarita and The Seagull (Festival Theatre) and Doctor Faustus and Nathan the Wise (Minerva Theatre) and in 2005 he directed 5/11 and King Lear.
His last West End productions were of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None at the Gielgud Theatre and the ambitious Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House.
Obituary: Steven Pimlott
A theatre director with operatic flair, he embraced high art and commercial success
Nicholas Hytner and Michael Coveney Friday February 16, 2007, The Guardian
Nicholas Hytner writes: Steven Pimlott had a superhuman appetite for experience. I saw him first in 1967 when, as a new boy at Manchester grammar school, I saw his performance of Claire Zachanassian in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit. It remains one of the most terrifying and glamorous performances I have seen. He was three years older than me and I aspired to be his friend, and to copy all he did. I have since to a large degree followed in his footsteps, and his friendship has immeasurably enriched my life as it has of countless others.
His enthusiasms were irresistible and numerous, and he made it impossible not to share them. His passion for Racine was as infectious as his devotion to Blackpool pleasure beach. When he appeared in D'Oyly Carte's HMS Pinafore, all his childhood dreams came true. As he was much the best actor of any director of my acquaintance, he was also - to nobody's surprise - hilarious.
He was a marvellous oboist, and the house he shared near Colchester with Daniela, their children and his mother, was filled with music. He recently started playing professionally, somehow squeezing concerts into a life that was already jam-packed. Not long ago he played the oboe obligatos in the St Matthew Passion under Sir Colin Davis. Another member of the wind section said to him "I can tell you don't do this full time, because I've never sat next to anyone who loved playing so much."
He threw himself at everything with a voracious love. Last summer he gave his annual garden party, which echoed - as it always did - to the sound of joyfully played chamber music. Although desperately ill, he played oboe in the Mozart Gran Partita, which hundreds of his friends will now associate with him for ever. He rallied in the autumn, and was well enough to start work on Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo at the National Theatre, which he was rehearsing with gusto when the cancer returned, only a few days ago.
There was nobody in the theatre who was better company and was more fun.
Michael Coveney writes: Steven Pimlott, who has died of throat cancer
aged 53, was a theatre director of unusual versatility and catholicity of
taste. He once recalled that his first childhood experiences of actors were
Richard III at Stratford-upon-Avon and the film of The King and I " and in
a way I've always had an equal passion for both". He was, he said, as
happy to be with Gilbert and Sullivan as with Shakespeare, Agatha Christie or
Andrew Lloyd Webber.
An artistic associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was appointed an associate director in 1996, he also pursued a successful international career as an opera director (working at first with Opera North and the English National Opera from the mid-1970s) and then as a director of big West End musicals: he staged the gloriously excessive revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring Jason Donovan, at the London Palladium in 1991 (the production later went on tour in Britain, Canada, Australia and north America); a colourfully extravagant revival of Leslie Bricusse's Doctor Doolittle at the Apollo, Hammersmith, in 1998; and Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Bollywood" production of A R Rahman's Bombay Dreams (2002) at the Apollo, Victoria.
Pimlott's career, like that of his close contemporary, the slightly younger Nicholas Hytner - they were both educated at Manchester grammar school and Cambridge University - was in many ways made possible by Trevor Nunn, the first modern-day director to become seriously wealthy by mixing a career in the subsidised sector with commercial success.
In 2003 Pimlott formed an artistic triumvirate with Martin Duncan and Ruth Mackenzie at the Chichester Festival Theatre, where his productions included a revelatory revival of Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise, an astonishing plea for religious tolerance starring an incandescent Michael Feast; a quick and lucid The Seagull (in which Sheila Gish, wearing an eye-patch after battling cancer, bravely gave her last stage performance); a tumultuous revival of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and David Warner as a heart-breaking, chamber-scale King Lear.
He was an ever popular, ever discreet company leader, steadying the ship as Adrian Noble's RSC sailed into ever choppier administrative waters and then blazing forth with Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea at English National Opera in 2000, which established Alice Coote's reputation and was one of the finest baroque revivals seen in Britain since Peter Hall's glory days at Glyndebourne.
It was typical of his enthusiasms that his last West End production, a sleek rewrite (by Kevin Elyot) of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None at the Gielgud Theatre should be counterpointed by an ambitious Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House.
Pimlott read English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was an enthusistic actor and director (he would even reminisce about his Gertrude at Manchester grammar, opposite television historian Michael Wood's Hamlet).
He joined the ENO as a staff producer in 1976, worked with Opera North (La Bohéme, Tosca and Nabucco confirmed his liking for the core repertoire) and then Scottish Opera, before working in the leading regional houses in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, where his 1988 Crucible production of Botho Strauss's The Park, a modern urban treatment of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, was an outstanding example of his European sensibilities.
He cemented important collaborative partnerships with the designers Ashley Martin-Davis, Mark Thompson and Anthony McDonald (also a director) in this period, and often worked with Jeremy Sams as translator and Jason Carr as composer. He made a mark at the National Theatre with the British premiere of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George in 1990 and, in the following year, with Charles Kay's compelling Harpagon in Sams's new translation of Molière's The Miser.
His lucid, generous productions of three compelling plays by the American dramatist Phyllis Nagy - Butterfly Kiss at the Almeida in 1994, The Strip at the Royal Court in 1995 and Never Land at the Royal Court (during the Ambassadors Theatre period of refurbishment in Sloane Square) in 1998 - revealed the best of his talent for musical interpretation of text.
After a spectacular RSC debut with Julius Caesar in 1991 (Robert Stephens in the title role, the last two acts as exciting as the first three, for once), he consolidated his RSC status with a beautiful modern-dress revival of TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and an unusually eclectic, entertaining Richard III with David Troughton in the lead.
Troughton would also play Bolingbroke to Sam West's Richard II for Pimlott in a startling white chamber setting. Pimlott also directed West in a full four-hour Hamlet in 2001, having two years previously offered a superb main-stage Antony and Cleopatra in which Alan Bates was first seen with his face in Frances de la Tour's lap.
Pimlott's RSC revival of Tennessee Williams's Camino Real in the Swan at Stratford in 1997 was an irresistible reclamation of a "difficult" play, seething with life and marvellous performances from Leslie Phillips as a cynical hotelier, Peter Egan as Casanova and Susannah York as Dumas's Marguerite Gautier. The show bristled with the exultancy of the poetry of despair, a Williams speciality.
Pimlott was director of Raymond Gubbay's ill-fated Savoy Theatre Opera project in 2004, but was justifiably proud of having played a splendid Sir Joseph Porter in HMS Pinafore in the last D'Oyly Carte season at their famous address in the Strand. "I'm one of the last Savoyards," he would declare, eyes glinting with eager self-mockery.
He was awarded the OBE in the 2007 new year honours list. Pimlott, whose hobby was playing the oboe, is survived by his German soprano wife, Daniela Bechly, whom he married in 1991, and their two sons and one daughter.
· Steven Charles Pimlott, theatre and opera director, born April 18 1953; died February 14 2007
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