Hugh Hunt Collection

Materials related to theatre director Hugh Hunt (1911 - 1993). Includes 3 letters, 1 pencil drawing of Hunt by Sean O'Sullivan, and 6 prompt scripts annotated by Hugh Hunt.

View the collection catalogue: http://www.calmview.co.uk/bristoltheatrearchive/calmview/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=HH

The archive has been divided into its main functions which have created records.

<span class="wrapper">Further Hugh Hunt material is stored at the John Rylands Library University of Manchester. Reference GB 133 HUNT <https:/></span>

Hugh Hunt (1911-1993), theatre director and founding professor of drama at the University of Manchester was born on 25 September 1911 at Camberley, the son of an officer in the Indian Army. His brother was Lord (John) Hunt, who led the successful expedition to Everest. Hunt was educated at Marlborough and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was president of Oxford University Dramatic Society. At Oxford, he directed a well-received production of King John. After graduation, he went to work as assistant to Nugent Monck at Maddermarket theatre in Norwich, followed by stints at Croydon Repertory Theatre and the Westminster Theatre. From 1935 to 1938 he was a producer at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, where he put on over thirty new plays by Irish writers, including Paul Vincent Carroll's Shadow and Substance.

After war service, Hunt became a director at the Old Vic Company at Theatre Royal Bristol (a.k.a. Bristol Old Vic) from 1946-1949, where he enjoyed success with productions of King Lear, Tess of the d'Urbervillles and Hamlet. He was then promoted to be a director of the Old Vic Company at New Theatre London, where his opening production of Love's Labour's Lost in 1949 was probably the most successful of his career. This was fortuitous as his arrival at the Old Vic coincided with the removal of the directorial triumvirate of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Burrell, which was not universally popular. In 1950 Hunt's co-directors Michel Saint-Denis, Glen Byam-Shaw and George Devine resigned, leading to a management crisis at the Old Vic. Hunt moved to become administrative director, although it was felt his talents lay elsewhere; in 1951, he became artistic director, but 1952-3 proved to be his last season at the Theatre. In 1954 he adjudicated at the Canadian Drama Festival and in 1955 became executive officer of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in Australia, where he planned seasons of ballet and opera as well as drama. He also helped launch the Australian Institute of Dramatic Art.

In 1960 Hunt returned to Britain and in the following year was appointed first professor of drama at Manchester University, which was only the second drama department to be set up in the UK. At Manchester, Hunt stressed the practical side of the subject, and he himself directed several plays including Romeo and Juliet , Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Hunt instigated the building of the University Theatre, which opened in 1965, and encouraged professional theatre companies to use it, including the Century Theatre, Theatre '69 (later Manchester Royal Exchange Co.) and the Contact Theatre Company. He also continued to work with the Abbey Theatre.

Hunt's attitude to his profession was summarised in a series of lectures delivered at Bristol and Yale, and published as The Director in the Theatre (1954); he also published Old Vic Prefaces: Shakespeare and the Producer (1954) and The Abbey, Ireland's National Theatre (1979). Hunt married in 1940 and had two children. He died on 22 April 1993.