Director of the Prospect Theatre Company, he nurtured the leading lights of the British stage
Toby Robertson, who has died aged 83, was the artistic director of the Prospect Theatre Company from 1964 to 1978, and re-established the good name and reputation of touring theatre in the UK after it had become a byword for second-rate tattiness in the 1950s. Large and enthusiastic, with a Falstaffian relish about him, Robertson was an ebullient, buccaneering figure, commanding the respect not only of his immediate colleagues, but also of the Arts Council and the house god of Cambridge theatre, George Rylands.
Rylands, a King's College fellow and friend of EM Forster, was an active patron of the Marlowe Society and chairman of the city's Arts theatre, and Robertson was one of many remarkable students – others were Peter Hall, John Barton, Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen – who, as Cavalier graduates of both the university and the Marlowe, renovated the British theatre, alongside their Roundhead rivals at the "new writing" headquarters of the Royal Court.
Hall and Barton set up the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the new National Theatre flourished under Laurence Olivier. Meanwhile, Robertson and his colleagues – the director Richard Cottrell and the administrator Iain Mackintosh, who had launched Prospect together at the Oxford Playhouse in 1961 – pioneered a type of flexible, well-acted and beautifully costumed classical theatre. The designs were minimal, so the company could play the Sunderland Empire one night and the intimate Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond, North Yorkshire, the next.
While Jacobi and McKellen were reasonably well known at the National, it was with Prospect that Jacobi played his Hamlet and Ivanov, and McKellen his sensational breakthrough performances of Richard II (directed by Cottrell) and Marlowe's Edward II (directed by Robertson) at the Edinburgh festival in 1969. The latter two productions toured Britain and Europe before settling in London at the Mermaid and breaking box-office records at the Piccadilly.
Robertson led the company with a mixture of swagger and good old-fashioned bluster tempered with guile, and his roster of actors was tribute to his powers of persuasion: Eileen Atkins, Prunella Scales, Barbara Jefford, Timothy West, John Turner and Robert Eddison were all involved, and gave major performances in plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dryden, Gogol and John Vanbrugh. Prospect's famous productions included Cottrell's adaptation of Forster's A Room with a View; The Cherry Orchard starring Lila Kedrova; and a superb staging of Turgenev's A Month in the Country, with Jacobi and West flanking a stunning performance by Dorothy Tutin.
Over 10 years, Prospect appeared at eight Edinburgh festivals, mounting 16 productions, 13 of them presented in London. But things started to go wrong when the company sought a base at the Old Vic in 1977 and there was confusion over whether this contravened the terms of their touring subsidy.
Robertson was in effect fired in an Arts Council-backed palace putsch in 1980, while he was abroad with the company in China. He never really recovered from this disappointment and fell out with West, his successor at the Old Vic, who had worked with Prospect for 16 years.
The son of David Lambert Robertson, a naval officer, and his wife, Felicity Douglas, a playwright, Robertson was educated at Stowe school, Buckinghamshire, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was christened Sholto, but became known as "Toby", he said, as a result of reciting "To be, or not to be" from an early age. He did his national service with the East African Rifles and boasted of single-handedly quelling a Mau-Mau uprising.
He appeared in a Marlowe Society production of Romeo and Juliet at the Phoenix in London, in 1952, and with the Elizabethan Players (directed by Barton) in a Richard II in Kidderminster in 1954. He appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957 in Peter Brook's production of The Tempest with John Gielgud (whom he also understudied) and made his professional London debut in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, directed by Peter Wood, at the Arts theatre, in the following year.
He worked in television between 1959 and 1963, directing more than 25 new plays, several for ITV's Armchair Theatre and the BBC's Wednesday Play. He also assisted Brook on his 1963 film of Lord of the Flies. In 1962, Robertson directed Gorki's The Lower Depths for the RSC. He met his future wife, the actor and writer Jane McCulloch, when he auditioned her at Pitlochry theatre. They married in 1964 and set up home in Spencer Park, Wandsworth Common. "He Svengali-ed me," says the much younger McCulloch, who had attended that 1957 production of The Tempest with her father, a vicar in Warwick, and circled Robertson's photograph in the programme – she still has it – with the caption "good-looking man".
Robertson sacrificed his spectacular (and financially rewarding) television career for Prospect; he was totally committed to the ideals of touring. Music played an increasing part, with Carl Davis composing a fine score for a Pericles in 1973 that was largely set in the brothel at Mytilene, and Donald Fraser (with whom McCulloch started an affair that contributed to the breakdown of the marriage) scoring Christopher Logue's War Music in 1977.
After leaving the Old Vic, Robertson succeeded George Roman as artistic director of Theatr Clwyd in Mold, Flintshire, which he ran from 1985 to 1992, raising its profile considerably. Many of the shows – Atkins as Medea, a wonderful revival of Shaw's You Never Can Tell – transferred to London. At the Haymarket in 1986, he directed Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Dalton in The Taming of the Shrew (lively) and Antony and Cleopatra (disappointing).
His theatre work now became sporadic, though he directed both Luciano Pavarotti and Jessye Norman in operas in the US. There was a charming account in 1992 of Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells at the Comedy theatre, including Sarah Brightman, Michael Hordern, Helena Bonham-Carter and Ronnie Stevens.
But the fire was dampened, and not helped by a violent mugging he endured in 1993 in Camberwell, south London. He remained friends with McCulloch (they divorced in 1981) and enjoyed the last 15 years of his life, painting, sailing and carousing. He was diagnosed with liver cancer five years ago and suffered a serious stroke in April this year.
He is survived by McCulloch, their four children and 10 grandchildren.
• Toby (Sholto David Maurice) Robertson, theatre director, born 29 November 1928; died 4 July 2012