Mike Bradwell: Director and actor who founded Hull Truck theatre company dead at 77

Named after the vehicle in which they travelled between venues, Hull Truck went on the road for 11 years performing plays, experimental theatre and shows for children.

Company members lived and rehearsed in Coltman Street, devising performances that were staged in working men’s clubs and as late-night cabaret.

Bradwell, who insisted all his actors play instruments, placed music at the heart of their work, along with an underlying sense of anarchy.

He directed all of Hull Truck’s productions for its first 10 years including his own plays The Knowledge, Oh What!, Bridget’s House, A Bed of Roses, and Still Crazy After All These Years.

The company’s reputation was such that it became the first of Britain’s ‘fringe’ theatres to be invited to play the National Theatre and to create new drama for BBC Television.

The playwright John Godber, his successor as Hull Truck’s artistic director, described Bradwell as “a maverick and a disruptor”.

“One of the things that he said to me was make a nuisance of yourself, which I think is a great thing for theatre companies to pin their philosophy to,” Godber said.

It was around 1969 that Bradwell worked with director Mike Leigh on his first feature film, Bleak Moments.

Made with what became Leigh’s trademark method of improvisation, gathering actors to work together on a loose idea, Bradwell thought: “I want some of that.”

He placed an advertisement in Time Out in which he announced he was looking for people to help start a theatre company. It read: “Half formed theatre company seeks other half.”

Born south of the Humber in Scunthorpe, Bradwell had trained at London’s E15 Acting School, and as well as taking a starring role in the Leigh film, had been an actor-musician with The Ken Campbell Roadshow and appeared on stage in a bizarre act as an underwater escapologist.

He chose Hull for his new venture, he said, “because nobody could keep an eye on us up there”.

Recalling the time for The Yorkshire Post in 2012, he said: “The DHSS in the 1970s was the biggest funder of the arts – we were on the dole, making our work and we knew that there were no jobs in Hull, so if we moved there, they wouldn’t be able to find us any work.”

It was an idea that quickly became redundant, for within months of setting up Hull Truck Theatre, the company was making enough money through touring shows around the country that it could afford to pay its members.

“We wanted to make plays about people like us,” Bradwell said.

“We wanted to make plays that were seen by Rolling Stone readers – we were Rolling Stone readers. I remember we used to say we wanted to make plays with the humanity of Chekhov and the rock sensibilities of Bo Diddley."

He and the original Truckers, John Lee, Steve Halliwell, Dave Greaves, Alan Williams, Cas Patton, Rachel Bell, Mary East, Pete Nicholson, David Ambrose, Steve Marshall and David Hatton, returned to Hull to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary.

By that time Bradwell had been artistic director of the celebrated Bush Theatre in London. And his book on alternative theatre, The Reluctant Escapologist, won the Society for Theatre Research’s Theatre Book Prize in 2010.

He is survived by his partner, the actor and writer Helen Cooper, and by their daughter, a grandson, and his sister.