Toby Robertson

Toby Robertson (29 November 1928, London - 4 July 2012, London) was the artistic director of the Prospect Theatre Company from 1964 to 1978. He was recognised as having "re-established the good name and reputation of touring theatre in the UK after it had become a byword for second-rate tattiness in the 1950s".

The son of David Lambert Robertson, a naval officer, and his wife, Felicity Douglas, a playwright, Robertson was educated at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Christened Sholto, he became known as "Toby" (he claimed, as a result of reciting "To be, or not to be" from an early age). He did his national service with the East African Rifles.

He appeared in a Marlowe Society production of Romeo and Juliet at the Phoenix Theatre in London, in 1952, and with the Elizabethan Players in a Richard II in Kidderminster in 1954. He appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957 in Peter Brook's production of The Tempest with John Gielgud (whom he also understudied). The following year he made his professional London debut in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, directed by Peter Wood, at the Arts theatre.

Robertson worked in television between 1959 and 1963, directing more than 25 new plays, several for ITV's Armchair Theatre and the BBC's The Wednesday Play. He also assisted Brook on his 1963 film Lord of the Flies. In 1962, Robertson directed Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Robertson became involved as a director with the Prospect Theatre Company, which was launched at the Oxford Playhouse in 1961. When in 1964 the company found a permanent base at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, Robertson became its artistic director, and annually staged three to four classical plays.

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