Ian Judge, who has died aged 79, enjoyed a wide-ranging career as a theatre and opera director without any of the obvious attributes for being so – no university or musical education, no artistic background, no connections – yet he succeeded over many decades in opera houses around the world, and for 10 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
His breakthrough happened after a chance encounter in the 1980s at a dinner party with the operatic supremo David Pountney – who was then running ENO. Pountney, having never seen Judge’s work, but liking the way he talked about it, invited him to direct Gounod’s Faust for the company in 1985. Ten years later, for the same company, he directed Lesley Garrett in La Belle Vivette, Michael Frayn’s rewrite of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, best described, perhaps, as a collectors’ item.
