42 British theatre directors

Lucy Bailey is a British theatre director, known for productions such as Baby Doll at Britain's National Theatre and a notorious Titus Andronicus which had many members of the audience fainting. Bailey founded the Gogmagogs theatre-music group (1995–2006) and was Artistic Director and joint founder of the Print Room theatre in West London (2010-2012). She has worked extensively with Bunny Christie and other leading stage designers, including her husband William Dudley.

Chris Baldwin is a British performance director and curator, professor and writer, he has lived in northern Spain for 20 years. He develops site specific performances and curated events devoted to specific city, rural or regional contexts. Baldwin's work emphasises the importance of a collaboration between professionals and citizens in the making and curating of cultural projects. He has various plays and Books published about theatre and the teaching of history in post authoritarian countries. Baldwin directs widely including Spain, UK, Poland, Bulgaria and Germany. Baldwin worked for Rose Bruford College, 2012 Summer Olympics. He was Curator of Interdisciplinary Performance for the 2016 European Capital of Culture in Wroclaw, Poland and also works for the Universidad de Santander. He was Creative Director for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture.

Peter Stephen Paul Brook, CH, CBE is an English theatre and film director who has been based in France since the early 1970s. He has won multiple Tony and Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Praemium Imperiale, and the Prix Italia. He has been called "our greatest living theatre director".

Ian Brown is an artistic director and was chief executive of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. He took up this post in 2002, succeeding Jude Kelly. He was previously artistic director of the TAG Theatre Company in Glasgow (1984–1988) and the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (1988–1999). He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Robert Chevara is a British director and writer. He was born in London to a single parent Mother.

Edith "Edy" Ailsa Geraldine Craig was a prolific theatre director, producer, costume designer and early pioneer of the women's suffrage movement in England. She was the daughter of actress Ellen Terry and the progressive English architect-designer Edward William Godwin, and the sister of theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig.

Richard Crawford is a British theatre director and actor known for the Secret Theatre Project. His productions are typically site specific and immersive. He is credited for introducing immersive theatrical productions to Hong Kong and Singapore.

Iain Cuthbertson was a Scottish character actor and theatre director. He was known for his tall imposing build and also his distinctive gravelly, heavily accented voice. He had lead roles in The Borderers (1968–70),Tom Brown's Schooldays (1971), Budgie (1971–72), its spinoff Charles Endell Esquire (1979–80), Danger UXB (1979) and Sutherland's Law (1973–76). He guest starred in many prominent British shows including The Avengers, Dr. Finlay's Casebook, The Onedin Line, Survivors, Ripping Yarns, Doctor Who, Z-Cars, Juliet Bravo, Rab C. Nesbitt, Minder, Inspector Morse and Agatha Christie's Poirot.

Daniel Gwyn Evans is a Welsh actor and director.

Eleanor Evans was a Welsh actress, singer and stage director. She performed in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas for over a span of more than 20 years with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. In 1949, she was appointed as the company's Stage Director and Director of Productions, continuing in those positions until 1953, but she proved to be unpopular with actors whom she directed because of her inflexibility and strict devotion to the traditional staging and comic business that had been used by the company for decades.

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado. The popularity of these works was supported for over a century by year-round performances of them, in Britain and abroad, by the repertory company that Gilbert, Sullivan and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte founded, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. These Savoy operas are still frequently performed in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Harold Goldblatt was an actor, theatre director and theatre producer from Northern Ireland.

Chris Harris was an English actor, director and writer. He appeared in several UK TV series including Into the Labyrinth and Hey Look That's Me. He also built a successful career in pantomime, acting as a pantomime dame, as well as being a director and writer at the Bristol Old Vic and the Theatre Royal, Bath. He lived in Portishead in North Somerset.

Stephen Henry is an award-winning theatre director, theatre producer, and an educator.

Joseph William Herbert was a British-born American director, silent-film actor, singer and dramatist notable for being the first person to play Ko-Ko in America in a pirate production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885) before joining D'Oyly Carte Opera Company touring companies across America (1885-1890).

Anthony Hippolyte was a British actor, director and singer who appeared on stage, TV, radio and film.

Anthony Hirst is a British actor, theatre director and narrator best known for playing Mike Barnes on the soap opera Hollyoaks and in Coronation Street as Paul Kershaw, the love interest of Eileen Grimshaw. Hirst also narrates the UK version of How It's Made, shown on Quest and the Discovery channels, and various programmes for Channel 4.

Craig Revel Horwood is an Australian–British professional ballroom dancer, choreographer, conductor, singer, author, theatre director and television personality in the United Kingdom. He is a patron of the Royal Osteoporosis Society.

Sophie Irene Hunter is an English avant-garde theatre and opera director, playwright, and former performer. She made her directorial debut in 2007 co-directing the experimental play The Terrific Electric at the Barbican Pit after her theatre company Boileroom was granted the Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award. In addition, she has directed an Off-Off-Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (2010) at Access Theatre, the performance art titled Lucretia (2011) based on Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia at Location One's Abramovic Studio in New York City, and the Phantom Limb Company's 69° South also known as Shackleton Project (2011) which premièred at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre and later toured North America.

George Ian Kenneth "Kenny" Ireland was a Scottish actor and theatre director. Ireland was best known to television viewers for his role in Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV in the 1980s, and for playing Donald Stewart in Benidorm from 2007 until his death in 2014.

Roland Jaquarello, born 14 December 1945, is a British theatre director and radio producer/director. He started his career in Dublin Theatre Festival after graduating from Trinity College, Dublin in 1968. Since then he has directed over 80 theatre and 60 radio productions in the UK and Ireland.

Caryl Jenner born Pamela Penelope Ripman was a British theatre director and manager. She is known for her work in creating theatre for children.

Keith Johnstone is a British and Canadian pioneer of improvisational theatre, best known for inventing the Impro System, part of which are the Theatresports. He is also an educator, playwright, actor and theatre director.

Fyodor Fyodorovich Komissarzhevsky, or Theodore Komisarjevsky, was a Russian, later British, theatrical director and designer. He began his career in Moscow, but had his greatest influence in London. He was noted for groundbreaking productions of plays by Chekhov and Shakespeare.

David Lan CBE is a South African-born British playwright, theatre producer and director and a social anthropologist.

Clare Tree Major was a stage director, playwright, producer of children's theater, and actress. She first acted in London, but in 1914 she came to New York to perform with the Washington Square Players. She was the first British actress to tour America from coast to coast. From the 1920s on she worked exclusively on theater for children, writing plays and sending professional actors on tour to perform them.

Sean Gerard Mathias is a Welsh-born theatre director, film director, writer and actor, known for directing the film Bent and for directing highly acclaimed theatre productions in London, New York City, Cape Town, Los Angeles and Sydney. He has also had a notable professional partnership with actor and former romantic partner Sir Ian McKellen since the late 1970s.

Brian Michaels is a British theatre and opera director.

William Graham Moffat was a Scottish actor, director, playwright and spiritualist. Moffat formed a Men's League for Women's Suffrage in Glasgow in 1907 after his wife Maggie Moffat was arrested at a protest in London and imprisoned for refusing to pay the fine. He is known for his 1910 comedy Bunty Pulls the Strings which was a hit on Broadway.

George Murcell was a British character actor.

Ellen Pollock was a British character actress, mainly appeared on stage in London's West End. She also appeared in several films and TV productions.

Raymond Montgomery Raikes was a British theatre producer, director and broadcaster. He was particularly known for his productions of classic dramas for BBC Radio's "World Theatre" and "National Theatre of the Air" series, which pioneered the use of stereophonic sound in radio drama broadcasts. He received two Prix Italia awards in 1965 for his stereophonic productions of The Foundling by A. R. Gurney and The Anger of Achilles by Robert Graves.

Gavin Richards is an English actor, writer and director.

James Roose-Evans is a British theatre director, priest, and writer on experimental theatre, ritual and meditation. In 1959 he founded the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London; in 1974 the Bleddfa Centre for the Creative Spirit, in mid-Wales; and in 2015 Frontier Theatre Productions. He is best known for directing the West End play 84 Charing Cross Road.

Steven Rumbelow, was a director in the entertainment industry for more than four decades. He began in theatre at the Bristol Old Vic, subsequently becoming the youngest director for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London before forming Triple Action Theatre and then later starting on films. His career has been a melange between media productions and theatre ever since. Rumbelow operated his own production company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Renegade Motion Pictures, with his wife, Rachel, until his sudden death from sepsis on 27 February 2016.

David Stuttard is a British theatre director, classical scholar, translator, lecturer on classical literature and history, and author, primarily of historical works on the ancient world.

James Tolman Tanner was an English stage director and dramatist who wrote many of the successful musicals produced by George Edwardes.

Matthew Warchus is a British director and dramatist. He has been Artistic Director of London's Old Vic Theatre since September 2015.

Les Waters is a British theatre director. Waters was the Artistic Director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. He has directed plays Off-Broadway and also at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Actors Theatre.

Thomas Wignell was an English-born actor and theatre manager in the colonial United States.

Richard Wilson is a Scottish actor, theatre director and broadcaster. He played Victor Meldrew in the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave. A later role was Gaius, the court physician of Camelot, in the BBC drama Merlin.

Arnold Emil Wolk is an Anglo-American stage director and stage and screen actor. He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award in 1988 as 'Best Actor in a Musical' for Kiss Me, Kate, sharing the award with co-star John Bardon.