There are few stage directors whose work, at the highest level, encompasses the plays of Joe Orton and William Douglas-Home, Tom Stoppard, and Hugh and Margaret Williams. Robert Chetwyn, who has died aged 85, embraced them all; he marked them with a gift for casting and an application of dazzling theatrical sheen.
He fired the rocket that was Terence Frisby’s There’s a Girl in My Soup (1966); it ran for six and a half years, establishing Michael Codron as a commercial producer, and was eclipsed in longevity only by No Sex Please, We’re British (1971) and Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife (1983). It was an ebullient farce inspired by one of the first television chefs – Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet from Down Under – and starring Donald Sinden, Barbara Ferris and Jon Pertwee. Chetwyn even provided the play’s title and then painted a much-needed gloss finish on the Williams’s The Flip Side (1967) with the aid of the designer, and his regular colleague, J Hutchinson Scott. To a younger generation, the names of Chetwyn and Scott were large-font playbill legends.
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