My friend and colleague Ilan Reichel, who has died aged 89, was a stage director and a movement specialist in actor training.
He taught in London at the Actors Centre (1983-95), at Rada as a senior tutor (1985-2006), and at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (2012-19). He also worked internationally at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio in Tel Aviv, and the Subaru Theatre Company and Joko Acting School in Tokyo.
As a course leader for the master’s in voice studies at Royal Central, I engaged Ilan as a visiting lecturer in the later part of his career. His deep love for his subject, backed by many years’ experience of working with actors, provided the students with teaching they would readily respond to, based on the recognition of an actor’s physical intelligence, and on sound principles that could be applied to a range of performance contexts.
Ilan was born in Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz near Israel’s northern border. His mother, Paulina, ran a beauty clinic, and his father, Jacob, was a carpenter who also took on artistic responsibility for the kibbutz theatre, film screenings and programming.
Ilan was educated in Kfar Giladi until the age of 16 but, in 1951, transferred to other schools in the region due to a shortage of teachers locally. He eventually moved to Jerusalem for further studies, and trained as an actor at the Israel National Theatre Drama School. In 1968 he relocated to London to study the Alexander technique of posture and movement, thus ushering in a long career in the UK actor training conservatoires as a movement specialist and director.
Oliver Neville, a former principal of Rada, wrote in 1993 that Ilan was informed with an “actor’s vision”, having the capacity to create “an instant rapport with young people”. The theatre director Geoff Bullen described him as “a great artist of the theatre”.
I will never forget Ilan’s forensic interest in all live theatre performance but, in particular, in the work of Peter Brook. I was delighted when Ilan invited me to accompany him on one of his many visits to Brook’s base at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, where, through his eyes, I was able to truly “see” and feel the performance afresh.
He is survived by his sister, Abigail, and two nephews, Ori and Assaf.
