Although he never worked for the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, the theatre director Alan Strachan, who has died aged 80, was an important, intelligent, civilising figure in West End and regional comedy and drama across five decades.
He directed the first West End revival of Terence Rattigan’s best play, The Deep Blue Sea, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1988, starring Penelope Keith in a revelatory performance (for her, and the play) in which the romantically conflicted heroine, Hester Collyer, rejected the suicide option with a grim, hard-won feminine independence.
