David Jones is a cerebral and versatile British-born director who worked on projects as esoteric as the neglected plays of Maxim Gorky, as admired as the films “84 Charing Cross Road” and “Betrayal” and as mundane as TV’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
As a stage director in England, Mr. Jones was prolific, working with both classical and contemporary texts, and anchoring dozens of productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was hired in the early 1960s by the artistic director Peter Hall.
As an associate artistic director, Mr. Jones was given credit for resurrecting the reputation of Gorky, the early-20th-century Russian playwright, whose skills as a dramatist had been largely subsumed by his revolutionary politics.
In the 1970s Mr. Jones directed four Gorky plays, including “Enemies” — with a remarkable cast of Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart and John Wood — as well as “The Lower Depths,” “Summerfolk” and “The Zykovs,” all at the Aldwych Theater, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s London home. In 1990 he added a fifth Gorky work, “Barbarians.”
In addition, Mr. Jones brought lesser-known works of Chekhov, Brecht, O’Casey and Harley Granville-Barker to the Royal Shakespeare’s audiences.
“He was underestimated in his own country,” the playwright Hugh Whitemore (“Breaking the Code”), said in a phone interview Monday. “His R.S.C. work in the 1970s was colossal.”
Indeed, Mr. Jones was an unsung member of the theatrical generation in England that included the writers Harold Pinter, Simon Gray and Mr. Whitemore, and actors like Mr. Stewart, Mr. Kingsley and Ms. Mirren, many of whom had extended artistic partnerships with Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones’s films brought him greater renown. Released in 1987, “84 Charing Cross Road,” with a screenplay by Mr. Whitemore, was an adaptation of the memoir of an American book lover, Helene Hanff (played by Anne Bancroft), about her correspondence and friendship with a London bookseller (Anthony Hopkins).
“Betrayal” was Mr. Jones’s film adaptation of Mr. Pinter’s reverse-chronology play about an adulterous affair; the movie, with an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Mr. Pinter, starred Mr. Kingsley as the cuckolded husband, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge.
Mr. Jones also directed two of Mr. Pinter’s works on Broadway, “No Man’s Land,” with Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards Jr., in 1994, and “The Caretaker,” with Mr. Stewart, in 2003.
Known among his circle as cultured and curious, modest and civil, Mr. Jones had a deep voice and a quietly commanding presence on any set.
“As a director he was patriarchal without the pomposity that normally accompanies patriarchy,” Mr. Kingsley said in a phone interview Monday. “He never infantilized the actor. We were always equal with him, which in a theater director especially is very rare.”
David Hugh Jones was born Feb. 19, 1934, in Poole, Dorset, on the south coast of England. His mother was a mathematician and a teacher, his father a Congregational minister. He studied English at Cambridge, where he absorbed the respect-for-text discipline espoused by F. R. Leavis, the critical giant of the time. Afterward, he joined the army and served in Hong Kong, working as a program host at a military radio station. Back home, he worked for the BBC, where he began directing, notably for Monitor, a pioneering television arts magazine.
His marriage to Sheila Allen, an actress, ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Tenneson, a photographer, Mr. Jones is survived by a sister, Gwyneth Jones, of Somerset, England, and two sons, Jesse, of Brooklyn and Joseph of Tucson, Ariz.
Mr. Jones came to prominence as a theater director in this country in 1980, when he became artistic director of a classical repertory company established by the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was an unusual undertaking, the creation of an American acting company by an English director, and it was, to judge from critical response to its productions, a semi-success.
Mr. Jones subsequently taught at Yale School of Drama and continued to direct films, including “Jacknife” (1989), starring Robert De Niro as a troubled Vietnam veteran; and “The Confession,” a 1999 legal thriller with Mr. Kingsley, Amy Irving and Alec Baldwin.
In recent years much of Mr. Jones’s work had been on series television, directing episodes of “The Practice,” “Chicago Hope” and other shows in addition to “Law & Order.”
When they were working together on the “84 Charing Cross Road,” Mr. Whitemore said, Mr. Jones “took the most enormous pains with every detail of the script and the set and the performances.” But it wasn’t that he was fastidious.
“That’s not the proper word,” Mr. Whitemore said. “He just wanted things to be right. He took the same pains when he was making himself a martini.”
Da The New York Times, 1 ottobre 2008
