David Hugh Jones - Education and Career

Education and Career

Jones was educated at Taunton School and Christ's College, Cambridge. Originally a television director, he first worked for BBC producer Huw Wheldon working on the Monitor arts television series from 1958 to 1964. His first London stage production was a triple-bill of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Mermaid Theatre in 1961.

He directed his first production for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Arts Theatre in 1962, Boris Vian's The Empire Builder, and two years later accepted the administrative post of RSC Artistic Controller, helping to plan programmes of new plays and European classics at the Aldwych Theatre in London. He also took over responsibility for running the Aldwych from 1969 to 1972, and again in 1975-77. During this period he championed the plays of David Mercer and Maxim Gorky.

For BBC television he directed Ice Age, The Beaux Stratagem and Langrishe, Go Down in 1978. He also produced Play of the Month (1977–79).

He left the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979, taking up an appointment as an artistic director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and to found a resident theatre company modelled on the RSC (Beauman 344).

After teaching at the Yale School of Drama in 1981, he returned to England where for the BBC Television Shakespeare series he directed The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982), and Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1984), and made his debut as a feature film director with Betrayal (1983), based on Harold Pinter's screenplay adaptation of his 1978 play Betrayal.

From 1973 to 1978, Jones was Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), at the Aldwych Theatre, where he directed plays by William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Anton Chekhov, Seán O'Casey, Maxim Gorky, Harley Granville-Barker, Graham Greene, and others, and became an honorary associate director of the RSC in 1991. From 1979 to 1981, he was Artistic Director of the BAM Theater Company (1979–1981).

He also directed three productions at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, in Williamstown, Massachusetts: On the Razzle (1981), by Tom Stoppard (2005); Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), by Tennessee Williams (2006), and The Autumn Garden (1951), by Lillian Hellman (2007).