Chris Parr, who has died aged 80 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was a champion of new writers throughout his days as a theatre director, when he gave breaks to Howard Brenton and David Edgar. On his subsequent move to the BBC as a television producer, then executive, this policy brought to the screen challenging dramas such as Graham Reid’s Billy trilogy – featuring Kenneth Branagh in his breakthrough role – and Takin’ Over the Asylum, Donna Franceschild’s serial set in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital.
Parr took his leftwing, anti-establishment views to the agitprop theatre movement of the 1960s. He and Brenton, a former classmate at Chichester high school for boys, were members of the experimental theatre group at the Brighton Combination “arts lab”. Then he directed Brenton’s anarchic play Revenge, about a criminal getting his own back on a police officer, with moral ambiguity on both sides, at the Royal Court theatre in London in 1969.
