Obituaries

College, Oxford, where he read English and was a contemporary of Melvyn Bragg, whom he
regarded as a smoother version of himself.
His leftism was at once natural, heartfelt and fashionable: after Oxford, where he was
enthralled by the New Left and worked in undergraduate theatre alongside John McGrath,
Ken Loach and Michael Billington, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and
went to Israel to work on a kibbutz.
He took a boat from Haifa to Marseilles and joined Roger Planchon's Théâtre de la Cité in
Lyon, one of the great Brecht-influenced postwar companies, which performed classics in
the suburbs. Planchon was Kustow's first professional father figure. As well as teaching
English and translating with the company, he appeared in minor roles in important Planchon
productions such as The Three Musketeers, touring in Germany.
Back in Britain, he became a postgraduate in the Bristol University drama department,
finding a sympathetic nexus of activity with Harold Pinter's first play produced there, Charles
Wood and Peter Nichols writing in the city and Tom Stoppard working on the local paper. But
in 1962 he was drawn to London by Wesker's Centre 42 project at the Roundhouse, and
then the following year by Hall's RSC. Wesker was Kustow's ideal of "a messianic Jew",
while Hall was a role model in applying the standards of the literary critic FR Leavis to
Shakespeare in developing a militant classicism; against which Brook was busy reacting and
churning up controversy.
Some RSC directors disliked Kustow's intellectual flamboyance, dismissing his influence and
that of the American director Charles Marowitz, Brook's associate on the Theatre of Cruelty
season, as pretentious. But Kustow and Marowitz widened the company's range and, in the
RSC magazine Flourish, which Kustow edited, created an invaluable outpost of criticism and
debate.
Kustow's first book, The Book of US (1968), was an account of Brook's anti-Vietnam war
protest play US, which he scripted alongside the poet Adrian Mitchell and the playwright
Denis Cannan. After four turbulent years he was ready for the even more volatile world of
the visual arts at the ICA, leading his troops into the Mall in April 1968, shortly before
Parisian students occupied the Odéon theatre during the May riots; the coincidence was not
entirely inappropriate.
When Kustow rejoined Hall as an associate director at the National Theatre in 1973, he took
charge of visiting foreign companies, in-house exhibitions and what became known as
platform performances, highlighting the work of Brecht, Philip Larkin, Groucho Marx and
Robert Lowell. In 1980 he directed Simon Callow in a performance of all Shakespeare's
sonnets; Callow was also involved in performances of Kustow's new translation of
Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale.