Obituary: John Russell Brown
John Russell Brown, scholar and theatre director, Professor of English at Sussex from 1971 to 1982, including a period as Head of English, died on 25 August at the age of 91.
‘JRB’, as he was known, read English at Keble College Oxford after war service in the Fleet Air Arm. He taught at the Shakespeare Institute and the University of Birmingham, where he was the first head of a new Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, before coming to Sussex.
He had published a valuable study of Shakespearean comedy in 1957 and good editions of plays by Shakespeare and Webster, all in the traditional academic mould, and he continued to be an important contributor to Shakespeare scholarship.
He knew all about gardens in Shakespeare’s England, for example, being a devoted gardener himself. But, fascinated by live theatre, he was also something of an academic pioneer in stressing text in performance, a concern reflected in books such as Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (1966). In 1973, during his time at Sussex, he was appointed as associate director and literary manager at the National Theatre under Peter Hall.
Though Sussex and the National still remained very separate places he trod the tightrope between the world of academia and the theatrical world with some distinction, stimulated rather than chastened by controversy in both. For him theatre, particularly Shakespearean theatre, should be a matter of language and the imagination more than visual spectacle or directors’ theatre which more or less extravagantly reinterpreted or reimagined the text. Unsurprisingly some of the theatre directors and theatre critics, suspicious of academics, were critical of the rather austere National Theatre productions of Hamlet and Macbeth which he influenced.
At Sussex and other universities in the 1970s new theory-driven political readings of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama vigorously challenged his emphasis on language and performance. Undeterred, a prolific writer as energetic in and around the theatre as in the study, he took a lively interest in promoting contemporary drama as well as Shakespeare. His path-breaking book Theatre Language: a Study of Arden, Osborne, Pinter and Wesker (1972) was followed by the controversial Free Shakespeare (1974).
Though he left Sussex and then the National in the 1980s he never really retired, teaching and sometimes directing all over the world from New York to New Delhi and continuing to publish new work such as New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (1999) and the Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre (2001) which he edited.
Emeritus Professor of English Norman Vance