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Alan Durband

Alan Ayckbourn
Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE (born 12 April 1939) is a popular and prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.
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Bill Nighy
William Francis "Bill" Nighy (, ; born 12 December 1949) is an English actor and comedian. He worked in theatre and television before his first cinema role in 1981, and made his name in television with ''The Men's Room in 1991, in which he played the womanizer Prof. Mark Carleton, whose extra-marital affairs kept him "vital". He became known around the world in 2003 as Billy Mack, the aging pop star in Love Actually, and in the same year played James Mortmain, the eccentric husband struggling to keep his family afloat in a decaying English castle, in I Capture the Castle''.
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Brian Jacques
James Brian Jacques (pronounced "Jakes") (born 15 June 1939) is an English author, best known for his Redwall series of novels, as well as the Tribes of Redwall and Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series. He also completed two collections of short stories entitled The Ribbajack & Other Curious Yarns and Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales.
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Frank Raymond Leavis
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John Mortimer
Sir John Clifford Mortimer, CBE, QC (21 April 1923 – 16 January 2009) was an English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author.
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Jonathan Pryce
Jonathan Pryce, CBE (born 1 June 1947) is a Welsh stage and film actor and singer. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and meeting his long time partner English actress Kate Fahy in 1974, he began his career as a stage actor in the 1970s. His work in theatre, including an award-winning performance in the title role of the Royal Court Theatre's Hamlet, led to several supporting roles in film and television. He made his breakthrough screen performance in Terry Gilliam's 1985 cult film Brazil.
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Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia "Judi" Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA (born 9 December 1934) is an English film, stage and television actress.
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Julie Walters
Julie Walters, CBE (born February 22, 1950) is an award-winning English actress and novelist.
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Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), McCartney is the most successful songwriter in the history of popular music, according to Guinness World Records.
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Pete Postlethwaite
Peter William "Pete" Postlethwaite, OBE (; born 7 February 1945) is an English actor.
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Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL (born 3 July 1937) is an influential British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has won one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy.
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Willy Russell
William Russell (born 23 August 1947) is a British dramatist, lyricist, and composer. His best-known works are Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, and Blood Brothers.
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Dingle, Liverpool
Dingle (known locally as the Dingle) is an inner-city area of Liverpool, Merseyside, England. It is located to the south of the city, bordered by the adjoining districts of Toxteth and Aigburth. At the 2001 Census, the population was recorded at 13,246.
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Everyman Theatre
The Everyman Theatre is a theatre on Hope Street in Liverpool, UK. It was established in 1964 to perform works of relevance to the inhabitants of Liverpool.
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John Robert Edwards
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Liverpool
Liverpool () is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880. Liverpool is the fourth largest city in the United Kingdom (third largest in England) and has a population of 435,500, and lies at the centre of the wider Liverpool Urban Area, which has a population of 816,216.
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New York
New York (; locally or ) is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border with Rhode Island east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Ontario to the north and west, and Quebec to the north. New York is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City.
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Alan Durband

Alan Durband (1927-1993) was an important figure in the education and arts community in Liverpool. He was head of English at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys and was co-founder of the Liverpool Everyman Theatre.

Early years and education

Alan Durband was born and raised in the poor inner city districts of the Dingle, Liverpool, (Drysdale Street) and Kensington (Esher Road), as the only child of a ship's carpenter, Joseph William Durband, who spent many months at sea on the 'banana boats' during the 1930s, leaving Alan in the care of his mother and aunts. His mother, Edith Durband (née Ashcroft), had come from a background ruined by the failure of the family horse-and-cart business in the late 1920s. She was particularly ambitious for her son, and even before he was born began making sacrifices and saving money from their modest income for the time when she might have to pay for a grammar school education. However, this was not needed, as Alan won a City scholarship from Matthew Arnold Junior School in the Dingle in 1938 and gained entrance to the prestigious Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, where he proved an excellent scholar, eventually being appointed to replace the Head Boy (accidentally killed in a school cricket match) in mid-year.

In 1946 he won a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge, but this was delayed by 18 months of compulsory National Service. Because of his pacifist beliefs, he refused to enter the armed forces, and as a conscientious objector he was instead assigned work in a coal mine. "He used to drive his car to work, passing the foreman on his bike" (Personal Communication, J. Eedle). This experience later gave him his schoolteacher nickname "Dusty", aggravated his lifelong asthma, and strongly influenced his political views.

He began undergraduate life at Cambridge in September 1948; his tutor was the noted literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis "At Cambridge he tried one afternoon of tennis and cricket on the paddock before deciding that sport was not for him, retiring to his diet of doughnuts and milk" (Personal Communication, J. Eedle). He was much influenced by F R Leavis and his views on literary criticism. He graduated in 1951, did a year's post-graduate certificate of education, married (Audrey Atherton) in 1952 and began his career, briefly in Bolton, then in September 1953 returned to The Liverpool Institute as an English teacher, later (1956) becoming Head of the English Department.

Teaching at the Liverpool Institute

His teaching work was generally with the higher streamed, academically-inclined boys and the Sixth form, in preparation for Advanced (A) level English or for scholarship exams to Oxbridge and he achieved very high pass levels and results. "Dusty" Durband later came to considerable public fame as the highly regarded Sixth Form teacher of A level English to Paul McCartney (1958 - 60) who achieved his pass in that subject.

Durband's teaching style was imaginative and engaging, displaying his enthusiasm for the subject and praising individual achievements. His discipline was strict but humane and he never resorted to the physical punishments so common in the school. All the plays were read aloud by pupils in class with dramatic flair encouraged. McCartney himself commented that he loved the way that Durband cut down the stories to expose their most basic themes, therefore simplifying them so as to be easily understood. - each volume a complete play, the original on one side and the same verse in modern English on the other. These were published from 1986 on. Judi Dench as a young drama student was a keen reader of these texts and Durband was particularly delighted that the headmistress of the school at which his daughter was teaching later banned his Shakespeare Made Easy version of Romeo and Juliet because the girls could understand the text of the play. (Personal Communication, J. Eedle).

Alongside his career and his writing, he was an avid promoter of the development and production of new drama & plays in collections entitled: 'New Directions in English', 1961; 'Contemporary English', 1962; 'Playbill', 1969 on; 'Prompt', 1973 on; and 'Wordplays' containing writers such as Alan Ayckbourn, Tom Stoppard, Willy Russell, Brian Jacques, Alan Bleasdale, George Friel & John Mortimer, etc.

Durband was also a motivating force behind the creation and renovation of The Everyman Theatre on Hope Street, Liverpool which opened in 1964 and earlier he had attempted with Sam Wannamaker *< ref> to revive 'The New Shakespeare' as a supper club until its mysterious destructive fire in 1959.

He served for nearly 30 years as vice-chair, chair and vice-president of the Theatre Board raising thousands of pounds by means of innovative seven year tax-free covenants for the conversion of the building. It was a popular theatre specialising in local Liverpool settings & political subjects which gave opportunities to new playwrights - most famous of whom is probably Willy Russell (to whom Durband lent his Welsh cottage to write 'Educating Rita') and to actors such as: Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Jonathan Pryce & Julie Walters who joined the Theatre company around 1975.

To mark this era, Willy Russell unveiled a plaque in memory of Alan Durband at the theatre in 1998 in the company of actor Pete Postlethwaite who acknowledged a great personal debt to his time spent on the stage at The Everyman.

Views and styles

Durband was an atheist, and like his mother, a committed socialist and a supporter of Left wing, 'progressive' causes. He was the Communist Party candidate for school elections in 1946 and he withdrew (at the Head's suggestion) in favour of the Labour candidate "to prove the value of the united left". [Source: School Mag. Feb. 1946]. At the same time he was creating imaginative money-making ideas such as an insurance scheme against physical punishment in which boys "paid him sixpence a week premium with pay-outs if we were punished"! (Personal Communication, J. Eedle).

His ideas were to evolve into an unusual combination of beliefs and experiences. His acute social conscience seemed to lie easily alongside a love of life with all its joys: of good food, wine and clothes, comfortable houses and luxury cars, made possible only by his entrepreneurial bent and an extremely strong work ethic which produced a steady flow of royalty payments from several decades of sales of his study guides in Britain and the United States. As an entry in the School Magazine (July 1962) announcing his departure, put it: "nestling in his briefcase alongside L5A's exercises were the latest brochures on refrigerators, washing machines, caravanserai, nuclear disarmament, brilliant new textbooks, and resurrections of long defunct amphitheatres". An obituary in the Liverpool Daily Post on 13 March 1993 said "His influence lives on in the minds of the boys he taught and the strength of popular theatrical productions in Liverpool".

He became a Justice of the Peace, (J.P.) in Liverpool in 1974 and is survived by his wife, Audrey, and his son, Mark, and daughter, Amanda.

Afterword

With the financial support of former pupil Paul McCartney, the old Liverpool Institute school building on Mount St. was saved and its interior transformed into LIPA, The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in 1996. It is particularly apt that his old English teacher's Classroom 32 was designated & plaqued as 'The Alan Durband Room'. Overlooking the school at the top of Mount Street at Hope Street is a sculpture (“A Case History” by John King, 1998) which depicts Durband's old briefcase cast in concrete.

References

Category:1927 births Category:1993 deaths Category:British conscientious objectors Category:English theatre directors Category:English educators Category:People from Liverpool Category:Liverpool Institute alumni

This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.