Malcolm Farquhar, who was a leading figure in English provincial theatre, has died at the age of 95. Possibly his most significant contribution was as Director of Productions of the rep company at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham from 1971 to 1983, although had appeared there as an actor as early as 1949 when it was still the Opera House.
Born in Swansea in 1924, he was brought up in Bristol where his father was manager of the Bristol Amateur Operatic Society and where his uncle was artistic director. He became involved with the Little Theatre in Bristol after having been a reviewer for the Bristol Evening Post during the war. He joined the Rapier Players there in 1944 after having been invalided out of the army due to ill health.
He worked in various rep companies around the country and made his first West End appearance in 1948. In the mid 1950s he played several characters in the original production of Salad Days at the Vaudeville Theatre for the last eighteen months of its run. He also appeared in another Slade/Reynolds musical, Free As Air at the Savoy in 1957, where he first met his lifelong friend Josephine Tewson.
He then started directing and after three successful West End shows in 1970 he was offered the job at Cheltenham. He was unceremoniously replaced at the Everyman after the major changes to the building in 1983-1985 and did not work much after that. He remained in Cheltenham for a while before retiring to Totnes in Devon. He died in hospital in Torquay on 30th December 2019.
I first met Malcolm in 2010 when I was researching my book on the Everyman and we became good friends. He was always warm and friendly and an abundant source of facts and anecdotes. He was good fun and I never tired of his company. He was one of what is now, sadly, a dying breed of those who worked in and remember the good old days of rep.
With his fund of wonderful stories going back more than eighty years Malcolm was also a great help to me when I was preparing my book Thespians. My last contact with him was a week before he died, his opening words being “I’m still here”.
The memory of Malcolm Farquhar will always be there. He will be remembered by those who knew him and by those whose careers he nurtured as one of the great men of British theatre in the middle years of the twentieth century. Michael Hasted 7th January 2020
