Unsung hero, founding father of the fringe.

Obituary by Carole Woddis

Peter Oliver who has died in Canada at the age of 81 is one of the unsung heroes of British alternative theatre. The founding father of fringe theatre in this country, his combination of intituitive vision, geniality and love of life turned an unlikely boys and girls youth club in south east London, the Oval House, into one of the country’s most exciting experimental arts centres. His legacy continues to this day in the ongoing vitality of Oval House Theatre itself and the widespread dissemination and popularity of physical and ‘performance art’ work he so helped to bring into being.

But for Peter Oliver and his wife Joan, it’s unlikely experimental and alternative theatre would have taken quite the direction it did in this country. Thanks to them, Oval House Theatre became the cradle of a new arts movement that spread across the UK and across time, giving a first platform to a legion of independent companies such as The People Show, Welfare State, Incubus, the Freehold, Foco Novo, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Hesitate and Demonstrate, Forkbeard Fantasy, IOU and the Pip Simmons Theatre Group, to name a tiny sprinkling.

Peter Oliver was an anomaly whose arrival at Oval House, in the strange way of fateful syncronicities, somehow put the right person in the right place at the right time. His training was in social work.

Born in Porthcawl, South Wales to middle class parents, his father had been a musician for the silent movies and was a gifted artist. Peter learned to dance and play the piano in childhood but gave it up at 17. At 18, he joined the army and went to Palestine where he ‘rode camels, dug latrines and managed to escape the bombing of the St. David’s Hotel in Jerusalemí.

In 1948 he left the army, complete with a cardboard box containing ‘a grey striped suit, a white rain coat, a green trilby, brown suede shoes, and eligible for a grant into higher education.’ Offered a place at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, he was turned down for a theatre grant with the words: There’s too many of you coming out of the army with the smell of greasepaint in your nostrils. You’d make a great Youth Worker. There’s a brand new course starting at Swansea University.

Traditional theatre’s loss was experimental theatre and young people’s gain. After ten years exhorting young boys to become good Englishmen through camping and other bracing outdoor sports in the north of England, in 1961 the actor manque found himself appointed ‘Warden’ of the Christ Church (Oxford) United Clubs at the Kennington Oval.

What ensued seems to have taken him by as much by surprise as anyone.

‘I did not arrive armed with a ready made revolutionary thesis or any anti-establishment ideas.ë If later self-testaments gave a sociological bent, with quotes from Diaghilev dancer Nicolas Semenov and French playwright and anthropologist, Jean Duvignaud, Mickey Rooney’s ‘Come on Kids, let’s put on a show ñ we can do it here’ seems to have been an equally powerful motivator.

At the Oval, one of his first acts was to substitute drama for competitive football, previously one of the club’s mainstay activities (Oliver was passionately anti-competitive) and convert an upstairs chapel into a rehearsal room for an aspiring rock group. Perhaps no wonder, one month after his arrival, members of the boys club were scrawling ‘Oliver Must Go’ on the entrance wall.

But Oliver ñ and Joan who acted as administrator - stayed on to gently guide a whole new generation and artistic movement into being and play host to actors, musicians, writers and directors who went on to become household names - Athol Fugard, David Hare (who with Tony Bicat, Howard Brenton and Snoo Wilson formed Portable Theatre), Salman Rushdie fresh out of drama school, Steven Berkoff, Pierce Brosnan, Mike Figgis, Mike Westbrook. The work was playful, political, rigorous, international and totally uncompromising.

With his carnivalesque spirit, Peter Oliver, part socialist-anarchist, part visionary-clown offered generosity, a welcoming heart and an unquenchable belief in the value of artistic creativity for everybody. At the heart of his work was a deep love of young people, trust in them and concern for their wellbeing.

He had a knack of bringing disparate communities and groups together and under his benign stewardship, there was with no distinction between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’. Youngsters from local Southwark Lambeth estates, junkie lighting talents from the furthermost reaches of New York’s radical theatre scene and Black Panthers meetings in an upstairs room could happily co-mingle in the Oval’s modest but hospitable coffee bar which became, in the words of one contemorary and in the tumultuous atmosphere of the times, ‘a living debate’.

Oliver’s great gift was to recognise the adventurous, anarchic spirit of the age and to give it house room ñ and even more decisively, to recognise genuine talent from dross. To those who frequented the outer shores of counter-culture he gave a sense of ‘belonging’ and support, free of demands or academic judgement. ‘You never got a crit back from him’, one has recalled, ‘he either gave you another gig or he didn’t!’. Peter Oliver was the ultimate conduit, enabler, self-effacing and quietly, joyously Rabelaisian.

Then, in 1974, Oliver was made an offer he simply couldn’t refuse. The acting bug got the better of him. Offered the chance, Peter Oliver ‘ran away to join the circus,’ and for the next ten years toured Europe with Pip Simmons and his company.

In 1985, he left England to join his daughter in Canada and renewed his social work, eventually retiring to to Shelburne, a small town in Nova Scotia where he continued to make theatre in the community. His last production was ‘It’s A Greek Thing’, loosely based on Aristophanes’s Lysistrata for Basement Theatre, the local theatre he had founded.

Peter Oliver is survived by his wife Joan, whom he married in 1951, daughter Odette and one grand-daughter.

Peter Caddwalladder Oliver: radical educationalist, humanitarian, social worker, theatre director, performer. b: August 11 1926, died Sept 18, 2007.