Chris Parr, who has died aged 80 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was a champion of new writers throughout his days as a theatre director, when he gave breaks to Howard Brenton and David Edgar. On his subsequent move to the BBC as a television producer, then executive, this policy brought to the screen challenging dramas such as Graham Reid’s Billy trilogy – featuring Kenneth Branagh in his breakthrough role – and Takin’ Over the Asylum, Donna Franceschild’s serial set in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital.
Parr took his leftwing, anti-establishment views to the agitprop theatre movement of the 1960s. He and Brenton, a former classmate at Chichester high school for boys, were members of the experimental theatre group at the Brighton Combination “arts lab”. Then he directed Brenton’s anarchic play Revenge, about a criminal getting his own back on a police officer, with moral ambiguity on both sides, at the Royal Court theatre in London in 1969.
The partnership continued when Parr became the first fellow in theatre at Bradford University (1969-72), forming its drama group, then at the Royal Court again and later during his tenure as artistic director of the Traverse Theatre Club, Edinburgh (1975-81). Showing creative inspiration, he staged Brenton’s mock “cabaret on ice” Scott of the Antarctic (1971) at Silver Blades rink in Bradford.
Edgar, a local newspaper journalist, was another commissioned by Parr to write material for Bradford students. The group took several of his plays to the Edinburgh festival fringe, including Acid (1971), transposing the Charles Manson murders to Britain.
The End (1972), Edgar’s drama about the nuclear disarmament debate, was another spectacle. The Bradford audience, given the chance to vote at the end, opted on at least one night to launch a nuclear attack – leaving them in shocked silence when the play finished with an enormous explosion.
Parr’s switch to television came in 1981 when BBC Northern Ireland spotted his talent for commissioning original writing. As the founding script executive and producer in its drama department, he was responsible for Reid’s Play for Today production Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982). It starred Branagh as the title character, a son in conflict with his fiery father, played by James Ellis, and left politics out of the story, set in Belfast, at a time when the Troubles were at their height. Branagh himself praised the play for portraying “humour and warmth and passion in working-class family life”. Sequels followed in 1983 and 1984.
After switching to BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham as a producer in 1984, Parr made a string 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 having an affair with the engineering firm boss she shadows. It won a Royal Television Society award. Education was firmly the focus of Chalkface (1991), the teacher-turned-writer John Godber’s account of the frustrations of comprehensive school staff in a deprived area.
Parr worked with Reid again on You, Me & Marley (1992), about joy riding in Northern Ireland, and continued to tackle hard subjects with Bad Company (1993), Don Shaw’s dramatisation of the real-life killing of the newspaper delivery boy Carl Bridgewater, questioning the imprisonment of the suspects. Four years later their convictions were overturned.
One of the suspects was played by Ken Stott, who then starred as an alcoholic hospital radio DJ in Parr’s Bafta award-winning BBC Scotland production Takin’ Over the Asylum (screened in 1994), with David Tennant among the patients. Parr, concerned to handle the topic sensitively, ran the script past Scottish Action for Mental Health.
At Pebble Mill, he 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, based at Pebble Mill and overseeing the territorial army comedy All Quiet on the Preston Front, launched in 1994, and responsible the following year for introducing 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 its drama group (1996-98), making the six-part Ivanhoe (1997) and the crime novel adaptations The Ice House (1997) and The Scold’s Bridle (1998). From 1998 to 2002 he was UK head of drama at the independent production company Thames Television, responsible, among other programmes, for the second series of the legal saga Wing and a Prayer (1999) and for 2001 and 2002 episodes of The Bill.
He was born in Dorking, Surrey, to Jane Parr, a cafe owner, and Serge Dohrn, an author and anti-Nazi German emigre who died in the bombing of a cinema shortly before his son’s birth during the second world war. Chris grew up in Littlehampton, West Sussex, and while studying classics at Queen’s College, Oxford, he started directing plays. Such was his enthusiasm for it that he was sent down in his third year for missing tutorials.
Parr was eventually awarded a bursary to train as a director at Nottingham Playhouse (1965-66), where Richard Crane was an actor. Crane, who went on to become the National Theatre’s resident dramatist, was commissioned by Parr to write plays at the Brighton Combination and Bradford University.
John Byrne, with the Slab Boys Trilogy (1978) and other plays, and Tom McGrath, with works such as The Hard Man (1978), about Jimmy Boyle, were newly emerging writers during Parr’s time at the Traverse, where Robbie Coltrane began his acting career.
The only drama that Parr directed (as opposed to produced) for television was Anne Devlin’s play The Long March (1984), made for BBC Northern Ireland, about a woman returning to Belfast as the IRA hunger strikes are about to start.
Devlin became Parr’s third wife in 1985, following his marriages to Tamara Ustinov (1973) and Theresa Crichton (1980), which both ended in divorce, and she adapted DH Lawrence’s novel for his 1989 production of The Rainbow.
He is survived by Anne and their son, Connal.
• Christopher Serge Parr, producer and director, born 25 September 1943; died 24 November 2023
