Theatre Director Who Was Prosecuted For Obscenity

The theatre director Michael Bogdanov, who has died aged 78, made it his mission to shake audiences out of their complacency, and into some kind of action.

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Michael Bogdanov 1938-2017

His Measure for Measure had actors in punk costumes; a Taming of the Shrew featured military bands and a motorcycle. A “cultural iconoclast”, an “unreconstructed socialist” and a man of great passion and warmth, he loved to provoke, said Michael Coveney in The Guardian, and had the reviews to prove his success in that ambition. But “Bodger”, as he was widely known, got more than he bargained for when, in 1980, his production of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain landed him in court, on charges of attempting to procure an act of gross indecency on the stage of the National’s Olivier Theatre.