Bryden, Bill Campbell Rough

Bryden, Bill Campbell Rough [ William Campbell Rough Bryden] (1942– ), Scottish director, who began his theatrical career as Assistant Director at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 1965–7, moving to the same post at the Royal Court Theatre, 1967–9. From 1971 to 1974 he was Associate Director at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh where he directed his own plays Willie Rough (1972) and Benny Lynch (1974). In 1975 he became an associate director of the National Theatre, staging such plays as Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1975), Osborne's Watch It Come Down (1976), and O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars (1977). He used the flexibility of the Cottesloe Theatre to stage excellent promenade productions (see THEATRE-IN-THE-ROUND) including The Passion (1978), drawn from the York Mystery Plays, and Lark Rise and Candleford (also 1978), based on a book by Flora Thompson. He also directed in 1980 a season of plays by Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller's The Crucible. In 1985 his promenade production of The Mysteries (The Nativity, The Passion, and The Doomsday) moved from the Cottesloe to the Lyceum Theatre, London. He has directed three of David Mamet's plays: American Buffalo (1978), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), both at the National Theatre, and A Life in the Theatre (1989).