Max Stafford-Clark


Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart "Max" Stafford-Clark is a British theatre director.

Early life

Stafford-Clark was born in Cambridge, the son of David Stafford-Clark, a physician, and Dorothy Crossley. He was educated at Felsted School, in Essex, and Riverdale Country School in New York City, followed by Trinity College, Dublin.

Career

His directing career began as Associate Director of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 1966. He became artistic director there from 1968 to 1970. He was Director of the Traverse Theatre Workshop Company from 1970 to 1974.
Stafford-Clark then co-founded the Joint Stock Theatre Company in 1974. Joint Stock worked with writers using company research to inspire workshops. From these workshops, writers such as David Hare, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill would garner material to inspire a writing phase before rehearsals began. This methodology is sometimes referred to as The Joint Stock Method. Productions during this period included Hare's Fanshen, Brenton's Epsom Downs and Churchill's Cloud Nine which Stafford-Clark directed, as well as The Speakers, a promenade production.
From 1979 to 1993, Stafford-Clark was Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre. He remains to date the Court's longest serving artistic director. He helped nurture emerging playwrights including Andrea Dunbar, Hanif Kureishi, Sarah Daniels and Jim Cartwright. His regular collaborators on his productions included the singer Ian Dury. During this time the theatre's productions included Victory by Howard Barker, The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar, Insignificance by Terry Johnson, Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Road by Jim Cartwright and Rat in the Skull by Ron Hutchinson. Perhaps the most important commission and production of this era was Top Girls by Caryl Churchill.
Our Country's Good is based on Australian author Thomas Keneally's book The Playmaker in which convicts deported from Britain to the penal colony perform George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer. Stafford-Clark wrote about his experiences of staging the plays in repertoire in his book Letters to George.
He has staged productions for Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival.
In 1993, he founded the Out of Joint touring company with producer Sonia Friedman, one of her first ventures after leaving the National Theatre. He was Artistic Director until 2017.

Sexual harassment allegations and aftermath

In July 2017, an employee of Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint theatre company made a formal complaint about his a tendency to make lewd remarks to women. An investigation followed and he was asked to leave the company. Stafford-Clark stepped down in September 2017. In the weeks that followed, three more women stated that he had "made lewd comments to them." going back several decades. The actress Tracy-Ann Oberman was among those who contacted The Guardian to relate their experience, taking the number of women who had made complaints about Stafford-Clark to five.
He was succeeded by Kate Wasserberg. By May 2021, the company had changed its registered address, professional and legal names. It became known as Stockroom, presumably as a reference to Stafford-Clark's work in co-founding and leading his first company. The name Out of Joint had cleverly used a famous three word phrase in Shakespeare's Hamlet to simultaneously describe the evolutionary legacy from Stafford-Clark's first company.

Academic credits

Academic credits include an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University and Professorships at the University of Warwick and the University of Hertfordshire.

Papers

In 1999 the British Library acquired Stafford-Clark's papers consisting of production diaries and rehearsal scripts covering his time with the Joint Stock Theatre Company, the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, and Out of Joint theatre company. The Library also acquired supplementary production diaries and rehearsal scripts in 2005.

Personal life

Stafford-Clark and Carole Hayman married in 1971; they later divorced. His second wife was Ann Pennington.
During a six-month period in 2006 and 2007, Stafford-Clark suffered three strokes, which left him physically disabled and impaired his eyesight. Stafford-Clark's experience, and the condition of the NHS, inspired Irish playwright Stella Feehily to write the play This May Hurt a Bit, first performed in 2014.

Productions since 2000