Ian Judge, who has died aged 79, enjoyed a wide-ranging career as a theatre and opera director without any of the obvious attributes for being so – no university or musical education, no artistic background, no connections – yet he succeeded over many decades in opera houses around the world, and for 10 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
His breakthrough happened after a chance encounter in the 1980s at a dinner party with the operatic supremo David Pountney – who was then running ENO. Pountney, having never seen Judge’s work, but liking the way he talked about it, invited him to direct Gounod’s Faust for the company in 1985. Ten years later, for the same company, he directed Lesley Garrett in La Belle Vivette, Michael Frayn’s rewrite of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, best described, perhaps, as a collectors’ item.
Plácido Domingo took a shine to Judge when he directed him in the 1857 version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra at Covent Garden in 1997 and, over the next 25 years – in concert with the costume designer Deirdre Clancy and the scenic designer John Gunter, alumni of the 1970s Royal Court – he directed mainstream opera in New York and Los Angeles, St Petersburg, Amsterdam and Madrid.
Judge was shamelessly “devoted to glamour”, he said, but worked ferociously hard, not least with the actors and singers he loved deeply, and was happy to be accused of not liking them because he insisted on being “tough”. Although he mellowed in later years, not realising how ferocious he was known to be in rehearsals, he took a perverse pride in being dubbed “the poison dwarf”. Judge was indeed small and cuddly in stature, and would recall that his early years as an actor were spent playing “funny people in sitcoms and furry animals”.
Aged six, he had gone backstage at a local Peter Pan and fell in love with the technical workings, the sound and the lighting. His doting parents – he was an adopted, only child – gave him a Pollock’s toy theatre and converted his bedroom into a theatre, complete with red plush seats (from a defunct proper theatre), curtains and a spotlight. In adulthood, he was the enemy of what became known as directors’ theatre. Conceptual theatre of any kind was, to him, anathema. He loved Victorian theatre magic, trap doors, tricks and high spirits.
This practical disposition was triumphantly indulged in a brilliant, surreal-into-pop production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors for the RSC in 1995, when the farcical mix-up involving two pairs of twins, the Antipholuses and their respective servants, the Dromios, were played by just two fine actors (Desmond Barrit and Graham Turner). The difficulty of presenting the final scene with all the characters on the stage at once was blithely overcome by using “doubles” and absorbed in the sheer buoyancy of the show. It was the best RSC revival of the play since the long-running improvisational Clifford Williams production of 1962 which, said Kenneth Tynan, defined the birth of a great new company under Peter Hall.
Judge was born in Southport, Lancashire, and was adopted in infancy by Marjorie and Jack Judge, who ran a confectioners’ shop – Jack also worked as a swimming instructor. Ian was educated at King George V grammar school, leaving aged 14 to work in a rates office, take part in amateur theatre and design window displays for a local department store. Five years later, in 1969, he won a place at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, where he trained as an actor. Graduating in 1971, he worked around the fringe and regions until offered an assistant director’s post by Terry Hands at the RSC in 1975. He stayed for five years. He subsequently learned about directing in whatever work came his way, including drama school shows, before he met Pountney.
His success at ENO triggered a return to the RSC in 1987, where he directed Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter in an extravagant art deco Wizard of Oz, closely based on the 1939 MGM movie.
One of Judge’s drama school productions, and the most significant, was the UK premiere in 1983 of George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along – a Broadway flop in 1981, now recognised as an ingenious, poignant masterpiece of interlocking friendship and careers viewed in retrospect – at the Guildhall. Judge’s production was pitch perfect when it transferred to the Bloomsbury theatre, where it positively gleamed with imaginative zestiness, even more impressive and moving for being performed by students at the start of their own careers.
He went on to direct hugely enjoyable revivals of the Gershwins’ Oh! Kay, with a light-headed book by Guy Bolton and PG Wodehouse, at Chichester in 1984; as well as Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (book by Hugh Wheeler) starring Lila Kedrova and Dorothy Tutin at the Piccadilly theatre and Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein for Opera North, both terrific, in 1990.
Other acclaimed productions for Opera North in the 1980s included Verdi’s Macbeth and Attila (John Tomlinson in the latter), Puccini’s Tosca, and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov – not exactly light-headed musical theatre, followed by Verdi’s Falstaff and Bellini’s Norma for Scottish Opera in the early 90s.
Judge acquired an unjustly condescending reputation for cosy comedy productions of Shakespeare at the RSC, perhaps due to his delightful, audience friendly 1994 versions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night, the latter complete with a Gunter warm glow stage facsimile of Stratford-upon-Avon itself. Anyone who didn’t find these shows knock-out treats (as I did) could relax into harshness with a superb 1995 well-judged revival of Troilus and Cressida – designed by Gunter and Clancy – with Joseph Fiennes and a new star, Victoria Hamilton, in the leads, an army of bare-buttocked soldiers and a lip-smacking relish for this truly great play’s exposé of a world of wars and lechery, lies and deceit.
His last London theatre production was a well-reviewed Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado, at the Savoy in 2000. “It’s a slick evening, with an emphasis on colour and wit: a fizzy tonic with a dash of bitters, and D’Oyly Carte back in its rightful place,” Robert Thicknesse wrote in the Times. Most of his subsequent work until 2009 was in opera, and mostly abroad.
Judge suffered from ill health in recent years, and was cared for by a longstanding and loyal friend.
• Ian Judge, theatre and opera director, born 21 July 1946; died 15 September 2025
