James Roose-Evans, the founding director of the Hampstead theatre club, who has died aged 94, was a unique link between the flourishing interwar London theatre club scene and the new, off-West End small-theatre phenomenon of the 1960s.
His 1963 revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in the new Hampstead theatre – a Portakabin erected as a temporary home but which lasted 40 years – signalled what Coward himself dubbed “Dad’s renaissance”; the next year, the National Theatre’s revival of Hay Fever restored Coward’s waning reputation. In addition, at Hampstead, Roose-Evans directed commercially successful productions of Laurie Lee’s glorious Cider With Rosie and Jack Pulman’s advertising agency comedy The Happy Apple, both of which, like Private Lives, transferred to the West End.
