Michael Boyd, 68, Who Invigorated the Royal Shakespeare Company, Dies

Michael Boyd, who led the Royal Shakespeare Company as creative director from 2002 to 2012, a decade through which he stabilized the group whereas enterprise formidable initiatives together with a heralded New York residency and the mounting of the un-Shakespearean hit present “Matilda the Musical,” died on Thursday at his house in London. He was 68.

His household, in an announcement posted on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s web site, mentioned the trigger was most cancers.

Mr. Boyd had a distinguished profession as a director stretching again to the early Eighties, when he was with the Belgrade Theater in Coventry, England. Work he directed there and in a subsequent cease on the Tron in Glasgow — a gritty city musical known as “Risky City,” a reimagined “Macbeth,” an adaptation of Janice Galloway’s novel “The Trick Is to Keep Breathing” and extra — caught the eye of playgoers and critics.

And in 1996 it earned him an appointment as an affiliate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the place he continued to direct well-regarded productions and, in 2002, stepped as much as creative director.

He took the job at a time when that venerable firm was dealing with challenges and criticism, together with over its current choice to vacate its longtime house, the Barbican Center in London, and reduce its ensemble work. Michael Billington, a theater critic for The Guardian, had criticized the outgoing director, Adrian Noble, for “attempting to create a revolution within the R.S.C. culture without getting the approval of the theater profession or the public.”

Mr. Boyd, throughout his decade on the helm, introduced audiences again; oversaw the renovation of the corporate’s theater advanced at Stratford-upon-Avon; created a replica of its classical theater within the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan for a five-play residency in 2011; and set in movement the World Shakespeare Festival of 2012, a multicity celebration involving greater than 50 arts organizations.

Mr. Boyd, The Guardian mentioned in summarizing his decade of management, presided “over a spectacular financial and architectural turnaround.”

In asserting in 2011 that he was stepping away, he mentioned the job had begun to put on on him.

“I’ve always said it would take 10 years to do something significant towards the life and the spirit of the company,” he advised The Birmingham Evening Mail, “though more than 10 years would potentially not be so good for the life and the spirit of the artistic director.”

But Mr. Boyd was hardly executed. He continued to direct notable productions, together with “Tamburlaine, Parts I and II,” the Christopher Marlowe basic, for Theater for a New Audience in New York in 2014. It’s a bloody story from 1587 concerning the warrior Tamburlaine, and Mr. Boyd didn’t maintain again; the present used 144 gallons of stage blood every week. For one impact, blood was pumped from beneath the stage in order that it will creep up the skirt of a specific character.

“We’ve designed a costume that’s very absorbent,” Mr. Boyd advised The New York Times.

Ben Brantley, reviewing the present for The Times, mentioned that “Mr. Boyd manages to balance the distancing effects of a Brechtian epic with the rock ’em-sock ’em thrills of a Michael Bay action flick.”

Mr. Boyd’s relationship with Theater for a New Audience went again years. Jeffrey Horowitz, the corporate’s founding creative director, famous that in 2007 Mr. Boyd had invited the group to carry its “Macbeth” to Royal Shakespeare’s Complete Works Festival, at which all of Shakespeare’s works have been offered at Stratford-upon-Avon.

“Michael Boyd’s generosity had a huge impact on T.F.A.N.A.,” Mr. Horowitz mentioned by e mail. As for “Tamburlaine,” the 2014 manufacturing, he mentioned, “Michael created an extraordinary sense of community in the acting company, instilling a passion for discovering and communicating what was living in Marlowe’s text now rather than being didactic about meaning.”

John Michael Boyd was born on July 6, 1955, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father, John, was a health care provider, and his mom, Sheila (Small) Boyd, taught artwork. Michael was raised in London, however when he was a young person the household moved to Edinburgh, the place the colourful theater and competition scene grabbed him.

“It was massively overwhelming,” he advised The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2002, “a crash course in all the different things that theater could be.”

After incomes a level in English on the University of Edinburgh, Mr. Boyd received a fellowship to spend a yr finding out theater in Moscow underneath Anatoly V. Efros, a number one Soviet director.

“What I loved about Efros,” he advised The Telegraph, “was his combination of bold visual flair with a complex understanding of humanity” — attributes that described a lot of Mr. Boyd’s work within the ensuing years.

Some of his earliest directorial work was on the theater in Coventry, a fast-paced, adventurous home.

“It was a mad time,” he advised The Coventry Evening Telegraph in 2002. “I remember doing 10 productions in one year, but it was also a very fruitful time for me.”

By 1986 he was on the Tron, one other buzzing theater. For his “Macbeth” there in 1993, he stunned audiences proper from the beginning, opening not with the same old witches’ prologue however with three cellists enjoying a dirge whereas corpses have been stacked in an open grave.

“It is a brilliant opening which demands an immediate reorientation of the responses of the audience,” John Linklater wrote in a evaluate in The Herald of Glasgow. “The physical and moral geography of the play is drastically rearranged.”

Just earlier than he was named creative director on the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was based in 1961 by the director Peter Hall, Mr. Boyd received an Olivier Award, the British model of the Tony, for steering the corporate’s historical past play cycle, “Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3” and “Richard III.”

His marriage to Marcella Evaristi in 1982 resulted in divorce. He and Caroline Hall, who had been his companion since 1991, married in 2004. She survives him, together with a daughter from their marriage, Rachael; two youngsters from his first marriage, Daniel and Gabriella; a sister, Susan; and a grandson.

One of Mr. Boyd’s bolder strikes throughout his decade as creative director was overseeing “Matilda the Musical,” a therapy of the Roald Dahl story.

The firm had lengthy been buoyed by income from “Les Misérables,” which it had produced within the Eighties and which ran on Broadway for 16 years in its preliminary incarnation, however Mr. Boyd knew {that a} contemporary earnings stream from a well-liked present was wanted. His gamble on “Matilda” paid off: It was successful in England in 2010 and later ran for nearly 4 years on Broadway.

Mr. Brantley, reviewing the Broadway opening for The Times, known as it “the most satisfying and subversive musical ever to come out of Britain.”