Peter Cheeseman

Peter Cheeseman, CBE (27 January 1932, Cowplain, Hampshire – 27 April 2010) was a British theatre director who is credited with having pioneered "theatre in the round".

His father's work as a Naval Communications Officer took him and his young family to many locations around England, and Peter was educated at ten schools (of which the last was Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool) before attending Sheffield University (1952) where he graduated in 1955 with a degree in English, Latin and Modern History.

Cheesman started his theatre work while he was in the RAF, and did some directing at university (including an "ambitious" production of King Lear).

After involvement with the left-wing Unity Theatre in Liverpool and work at Derby Playhouse Cheeseman joined Stephen Joseph's peripatetic Studio Theatre (in the round) which was then based in Scarborough. In 1962, Joseph and Cheeseman gained the use of a former cinema in Hartshill, Stoke-on-Trent, and converted it into the Victoria Theatre, a square playing space where the audience viewed the performance from all four sides.

Cheeseman became the sole artistic director for the following 36 years. In that time he produced new plays from such writers as Peter Terson and Alan Ayckbourn, using young acting talent such as Ben Kingsley. He was responsible for over 140 productions, old and new. A speciality was plays with a local resonance, such as The Knotty, about the North Staffordshire Railway, and The Fight for Shelton Bar, about the closure of a local steelworks.

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