Planet Theatre

Artistic Director - Adrian Brown

Adrian's career began on National Service when called on to mount Hay Fever and See How They Run for Combined Service Entertainment (CSE). At Oxford University he studied under distinguished tutors Neville Coghill, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Here he played Puck in A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and Michael in The Knight of the Burning Pestle in a tour of Germany for the OUDS, and directed Gammer Gurton's Needle for his college in the Fellows Garden. Subsequently, while touring the world with the Grand Ballet de Marquis de Cuevas, he met in Paris the playwright Terence Rattigan, who became a close friend. Soon he was beginning to direct in repertory theatres - Guildford, Bromley, Harrogate, High Wycombe etc. before he was poached for the Drama Directors Course at BBC Television. Here he did about a dozen drama productions, with such idols as Hermione Baddeley, Margaret Rutherford and Kenneth Williams, before leaving for the more lucrative ITV, where he worked on No Hiding Place, Top Secret, Knight Errant, Emergency Ward 10, Target Luna and hundreds of other programmes. He kept his theatrical hand in by tours of Androcles and the Lion, Doctor In Love with William Gaunt, Arsenic and Old Lace with Robertson Hare and Madame Chairman starring the Hollywood bombshell Veronica Lake. Shakespeare at the St George's Theatre included The Winter's Tale, The Taming of the Shrew, Coriolanus, Hamlet and Macbeth; while operas by Gluck and Weber were directed at the Hintlesham Festival, Gounod's Faust at Holland Park, and Verdi's Nabucco, which won the Kenneth More Award. Sweet Charity at the Ashcroft Theatre gained the NODA Award, while The Beggar's Opera toured Europe for the British Council. Continuing television work led to an International EMMY for The Belle of Amherst, starring Claire Bloom, while his all-star The Caucasian Chalk Circle was a BAFTA Nomination. Recent theatre productions have included The Beaux' Stratagem at The Kings Head, de Musset's You Can't Think of Everything at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, Antony and Cleopatra, Antigone, A Phoenix Too Frequent, Wild Oats, The School for Wives (awarded "Best Production", London Fringe Awards 2010), Troilus and Cressida, The Spanish Tragedy, and, to tremendous press in London and two recent nationwide tours, Terence Rattigan's "lost" comedy Less Than Kind.