A pocket dynamo of a man who seemed to bounce as he walked along, Frank Dunlop will be remembered for many outstanding and remarkable achievements, but most notably as the founding director of the Young Vic in 1969 and as a controversial director of the Edinburgh international festival from 1983 to 1991.
He was a key member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic, which he joined in 1967 as an associate director with a determination to initiate a young people’s programme; the Young Vic across the road became a vital and separate entity. He helped to start a new theatre company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 1976. And in Edinburgh he expanded upon the drama programme initiated by his predecessor, Sir John Drummond.
Dunlop, who has died aged 98, took Peter Daubeny’s World Theatre Seasons of the mid-1960s in London as his model, and brought to the festival directors as brilliantly diverse as Yukio Ninagawa, Ingmar Bergman and Andrzej Wajda, as well as the Berliner Ensemble in its last great phase and the Renaissance Theatre Company of the young Kenneth Branagh.
Dunlop’s enthusiasm for working with young people found a perfect outlet in his first professional staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Edinburgh festival of 1972. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber had by then hit the jackpot with Jesus Christ Superstar, so it was a canny move to revive the earlier work as part of a double bill entitled Bible One: Two Looks at the Book of Genesis (the other half was an adaptation of the Wakefield Mystery Plays) at the Haymarket ice rink.
The show transferred to the Round House in London, and thence to the West End, by which time the Mystery Plays prologue was replaced by a new Rice and Lloyd Webber mini-musical, Jacob’s Journey, with a script by the television comedy writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. This was a catastrophe, and soon withdrawn, leaving Joseph, bolstered with new songs and many reprises as a stand-alone success. Dunlop’s Young Vic cast included Jeremy James Taylor, who worked closely with Dunlop for some years before founding the National Youth Music Theatre in 1976.
Dunlop was born in Leeds, the son of Mary (nee Aaron) and Charles, and educated at Kibworth Beauchamp grammar school and, after national service with the RAF, University College London, where he studied English literature.
He trained at the Old Vic School with George Devine and Michel Saint-Denis before starting his own young people’s theatre company, the Piccolo theatre, Manchester, in 1954. He then signed up as resident director at the Bristol Old Vic in 1956, and made his London debut at the Adelphi theatre in 1960 with a play he both wrote and directed, Les Frères Jacques.
His 1961 production at the Mermaid theatre of a difficult, late play of Sean O’Casey, The Bishop’s Bonfire, convinced some critics it was the author’s best since The Silver Tassie. Dunlop was aware of the challenge, saying that “the sort of construction adopted here puts a great deal of strain on the actors, who must shape the drama as well as just play the parts”.
Although he could rustle up a feast for the eyes with the best of them, Dunlop was primarily an actors’ director and a great company man. With John Neville and Peter Ustinov, he was appointed a director of the new Nottingham Playhouse in 1961 and took charge of the inaugural season in 1963.
Before joining Olivier at the National, he directed Spike Milligan in the deliriously funny Son of Oblomov in 1964 and took his own lively Pop Theatre productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Trojan Women to the Edinburgh festival of 1966. At the National, he took a lot of the administrative burden from Olivier’s shoulders while providing the company with some of its most memorable productions: a surprisingly visceral version of the Brecht/Marlowe Edward II and a warming, reliable revival of Somerset Maugham’s Home and Beauty, both in 1968.
Three years later, there was an even more impressive double of a dazzling, white-walled The White Devil (with Edward Woodward and Geraldine McEwan) and a brilliantly funny Paul Scofield in Zuckmayer’s comedy of shifting social status, The Captain of Köpenick.
After launching the Young Vic – “a theatre after my own heart,” said Sybil Thorndike at the opening night (11 September 1970) of Dunlop’s energetic version of Molière’s Scapino starring Jim Dale – Dunlop still found time to direct John Osborne’s controversially ragbag, embittered A Sense of Detachment at the Royal Court in 1972.
He also came up with a glorious Royal Shakespeare Company Sherlock Holmes, designed by Carl Toms, a regular collaborator, and starring John Wood as a definitive Holmes and Tim Pigott-Smith as Watson in 1974. The show went to Broadway and opened more doors for the director.
Dunlop never worried much about accusations of being lowbrow, populist or eclectic. All these epithets flew around when he took over at Edinburgh, but he was a resilient, combative director, taking on critics and city councillors alike.
He was a great believer in the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, who gave 32 concerts in his tenure. Theatre critics approved the drama programme, but the music critics grumbled, one of them, Gerald Larner in the Guardian, suggesting that his programmes “seem to have been compiled from concert agents’ special offers”.
Early in his career, Dunlop had run the Théâtre de Poche in Brussels, an association that led to a constant welcome in Belgium’s theatres. He also worked consistently in Scandinavia and in Australia. His last London engagements were a revival of Camelot in 1996 – Dunlop had directed the US touring version in 1981 with first Richard Burton and then Richard Harris – starring Paul Nicholas and Samantha Janus; and a Carmen at the Royal Albert Hall in 1997.
In later years he lived mostly in New York, where he was at home scuttling around Greenwich Village. He was appointed CBE in 1977 and in 2017 received a special recognition Olivier award for his contribution to British theatre.
His sister predeceased him.
• Frank Dunlop, theatre director, born 15 February 1927; died 4 January 2026
