My friend and neighbour Robert Prior-Pitt, who has died aged 84, was an actor, director and drama lecturer who helped to revive the ancient Coventry Mystery Plays as a regular event in the city of their birth. He also had a complementary interest in painting, printing, digital art and photography which, like his theatre work, fed into his lifestyle.
Born in Coventry to Gilbert Prior-Pitt, a canal toll clerk, and Phyllis (nee Salt), who worked in the office at Cash’s, the silk weavers, Robert left school at 15 with no qualifications and became an apprentice silk-screen printer.
After national service he won a place to study drama at Rose Bruford Training College of Speech and Drama in Sidcup, Kent, where he met his future wife, Pauline Saville. After college he worked in theatres in London, acting with people such as Albert Finney and Donald Sutherland. Unable to get a mortgage in London, he and Pauline married and moved back to Coventry in 1962, where Robert returned to his job in silk-screen printing.
That same year he played the part of Jesus in a revival of the Coventry Mystery Plays, a cycle of medieval plays that originated in Coventry and are perhaps best known as the source of the Coventry Carol. The revival was part of the consecration celebrations of the new Coventry Cathedral and in 1965 he was appointed drama director for the cathedral, in which role he continued to keep the plays alive.
He also ran a thriving youth drama group, out of which grew a groundbreaking drama project, touring improvised plays on topical issues to church halls around the city, with experts to answer the audiences’ questions.
In 1970 Robert became a drama lecturer at Coventry Technical College (now City College Coventry), and when the council set up the Coventry Centre for the Performing Arts in 1984 he was appointed head of its theatre department. Robert’s mission and drive enabled young people to gain confidence through drama; many of them, including the writer and director Debbie Issett and the actor Jeffrey Kissoon, have testified to the influence he had upon them.
After Robert retired in 1990, he and Pauline moved first to Warwick, and then, in 1998, to North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.
He is survived by Pauline, their children, Paul, Charlotte and Adam, four grandchildren, Sam, Jake, Jack and Johan, and his brother, Phillip.
