Christopher Fettes, who has died aged 94, was, along with the director John Blatchley and the Swedish dancer and teacher Yat Malmgren, one of the three founders, in 1963, of the Drama Centre in London, perhaps the most radical drama school created in the UK, where I trained in 1970.
Born in Edinburgh Castle, the only child of Brigadier David Fettes, a military surgeon, and his wife, Hilda (nee Harvey), Christopher went to Marlborough college and then studied English at Magdalen College, Oxford (where his tutors were CS Lewis and AJP Taylor), before doing his national service in postwar Germany.
Following this, he was briefly and disappointingly an actor with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, later appearing in the first season of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in London in 1956. Soon after, he met Yat, becoming his partner and then assistant, first at Yat’s movement studio in London then at Rada; at the invitation of Blatchley, they both went as teachers to the Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1963 all three men, on the urging of their students, broke away to set up their own school.
At the fledgling Drama Centre, established in a crumbling former Methodist chapel in Chalk Farm, Christopher took on the task of forging the syllabus, creating an integrated programme that had no parallel in British drama schools at the time: mask and mime drawn from the work of the French director and theorist Michel St Denis; Stanislavsky, taught by the American acting teacher Doreen Cannon; Brecht, by Theatre Workshop veterans; and German expressionism, his own personal fiefdom. At the core of the syllabus was Yat’s work, “movement psychology”, extrapolated from the work of Rudolf Laban, who had bequeathed his final notes to Yat.
All of these strands fed into each other, but it was Christopher who forged them into a vision of theatre that encompassed the entire history of western playwriting: from Euripides to the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, to Molière and Racine, Restoration comedy and tragedy, French 19th-century comedy, the great Viennese interwar writers (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), on to Brecht and to the British moderns of the day, Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, Heathcote Williams.
When I arrived at the Drama Centre, Christopher had just shaved off his Viva Zapata moustache, a concession to his having turned 40, but even clean-shaven he possessed the fire of the Mexican revolutionary, as he unfolded his vision of drama and its centrality to civilisation. He saw us, it soon became clear, as recruits to a sort of theatrical SAS: who dared, would win. We were being trained, not for the theatre of the present, but for the theatre of the future.
Christopher was not an easy man; indeed he had a fundamental remoteness, but behind this lay great kindness and a deep concern for his students. He was a revelatory director of our student productions. Later he had some success in the commercial theatre – notably a Doctor Faustus (1980) which starred Patrick Magee and transferred from the Lyric Hammersmith to the West End, as well as several operas. At heart he was a born teacher, hugely demanding, but under his tutelage casements flew open for his students – among them Frances de la Tour, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender – who carried away with them the conviction that life and art were thrilling and dangerous adventures.
Christopher continued to teach at the Drama Centre until 2001. He and Yat remained partners until Yat’s death in 2002.
