Chris Parr, who has died aged 80 after contracting Parkinson’s disease, was a pioneer of new writers during his days as a theater director, taking a break from Howard Brenton and David Edgar. Later, when he moved to the BBC as a television producer and then an executive, this policy led to tough dramas such as Graham Reid’s Billy trilogy, featuring Kenneth Branagh in his breakthrough role, and Donna Franceschild’s 1950s-set series Takin’ Over the Asylum. brought it to the big screen. Glasgow psychiatric hospital.
Parr brought his leftist, anti-establishment views to the agitprop theater movement of the 1960s. He and Brenton, a former classmate at Chichester boys’ secondary school, were members of the experimental theater group at the Brighton Combination “art laboratory”. Later, at the Royal Court theater in London in 1969, he directed Brenton’s anarchic play Revenge, about a criminal who turns his back on a police officer, with moral ambiguities on both sides.
The partnership continued with Parr becoming the first theater fellow at the University of Bradford (1969-72) and founding the drama group, then again at the Royal Court and later during his time as artistic director of the Traverse Theater Club in Edinburgh (1969-72). 1975-81) continued. ). Showing his creative inspiration, he staged Brenton’s spoof “cabaret on ice” Scott of the Antarctic (1971) at the Silver Blades circuit in Bradford.
Edgar, a local newspaper journalist, was another person commissioned by Parr to write material for Bradford students. The group took many of its plays to the Edinburgh festival, including Acid (1971), which brought the Charles Manson murders to Britain.
Edgar’s drama The End (1972), about the nuclear disarmament debate, was another show. The Bradford audience, finally given the chance to vote, opted to launch a nuclear attack on at least one night, leaving them in shocked silence when the play ended with a massive explosion.
Parr’s move into television came in 1981, when BBC Northern Ireland recognized his talent for original writing. As the drama department’s founding script manager and producer, he was responsible for Reid’s Play for Today production of Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982). He played the title character, Branagh, a son at odds with his hot-headed father, played by James Ellis, and left politics out of the story, set in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. Branagh praised the play for depicting “the humour, warmth and passion in working-class family life”. Sequels followed in 1983 and 1984.
After moving to BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham as producer in 1984, Parr produced a number of critically acclaimed dramas. Nice Work (1989), starring Haydn Gwynne and Warren Clarke, was David Lodge’s four-part adaptation of his own novel, about a feminist university lecturer’s relationship with the engineering firm boss overshadowed by her. It won the Royal Television Society award. Education was the focus of Chalkface (1991), in which teacher-turned-writer John Godber describes the frustrations of comprehensive school staff in a deprived area.
Parr worked with Reid again on You, Me and Marley (1992), about a joyride through Northern Ireland, and continued to tackle difficult subjects with Bad Company (1993), which dramatized the real-life murder of Don Shaw’s newspaper deliveryman Carl. did. Bridgewater questions the suspects’ detention. Four years later their convictions were overturned.
Ken Stott, who played one of the suspects, later appeared as the alcoholic hospital radio DJ in Parr’s Bafta-winning BBC Scotland production Takin’ Over the Asylum (shown in 1994), which also featured David Tennant among the patients. Interested in handling the subject sensitively, Parr put the script through Scottish Action for Mental Health.
Pebble Mill also produced Fighting Back (1986), starring Hazel O’Connor as a single mother, and Lodge’s adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit (1994). From 1993 he was head of television drama at Pebble Mill, directing the regional army comedy All Quiet at the Preston Front, which was released in 1994, and the following year he was responsible for promoting Shaw’s popular series Dangerfield, starring Nigel Le Vaillant as a police surgeon. .
Parr moved to London as the BBC’s head of drama series (1995–96), then executive producer of the drama group (1996–98), producing the six-part Ivanhoe (1997) and the crime novel adaptations The Ice House (1997). made. and The Reins of Scold (1998). From 1998 to 2002 he was UK head of drama at independent production company Thames Television, responsible for the second series of legal epic Wing and a Prayer (1999) and the 2001 and 2002 episodes of The Bill, among other programmes. .
He was born in Dorking, Surrey, to Jane Parr, a cafe owner, and Serge Dohrn, a writer and anti-Nazi German immigrant who died in the bombing of a cinema during the second world war shortly before the birth of his son. Chris grew up in Littlehampton, West Sussex, and began directing plays while studying classics at Queen’s College, Oxford. His enthusiasm for this subject was so great that he was expelled from school in his third year for missing classes.
Eventually Parr won a scholarship to study directing at the Nottingham Playhouse (1965-66), where Richard Crane was an actor. Crane, who later became the National Theatre’s resident playwright, was commissioned by Parr to write plays for the Brighton Combination and the University of Bradford.
Tom McGrath, with his Slab Boys Trilogy (1978) and other plays such as The Hard Man (1978), about John Byrne and Jimmy Boyle, were emerging writers during Parr’s time at Traverse; Robbie Coltrane also started writing here. acting career.
The only drama Parr directed for television (as opposed to producing) was Anne Devlin’s play for BBC Northern Ireland, The Long March (1984), about a woman returning to Belfast as the IRA hunger strikes are about to begin.
Devlin became Parr’s third wife in 1985, following divorced marriages to Tamara Ustinov (1973) and Theresa Crichton (1980), and adapted DH Lawrence’s novel for the 1989 production of The Rainbow.
He is survived by the mother and their son Connal.
• Christopher Serge Parr, producer and director, born 25 September 1943; Died November 24, 2023