to the memory of bob

10.April 2014, 8pm

Bob Hewis

We will try to organise something better organised for him in fall.

We will contact his old friends and collegues.

For now we will only show a few old videos of productions he launched in the Laden.

An Article from his friend, director and journalist Paul Wetherby

in the  Guardian, Thursday 18 June 2009

My good friend Bob Hewis, who has died aged 56 of an aneurysm, was an actor, musician and writer.

He performed more than 130 roles in theatre, radio and television.

Born Robert John Hewis in Scothern, near Lincoln, Bob attended the village school and then De Aston grammar in Market Rasen.

He worked as a farm labourer before attending Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln.

In the 1970s he became a well-known singer on the local folk-club circuit,

and was a founding member of the professional touring repertory company Great Eastern Stage in 1976.

Bob’s many theatre credits included Macduff in Macbeth; Macheath in The Threepenny Opera;

Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (at the Everyman, Liverpool);

the Actor in The Woman in Black; Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird; Bob Crass in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (at the Birmingham Rep);

and Malvolio in Twelfth Night. He also acted at the Old Vic in 1980 with Peter O’Toole

in his (in)famous Macbeth and played Launcelot Gobbo in Timothy West’s Merchant of Venice.

Theatre work took Bob to Moscow, Kiev, Jerusalem, Alabama and Berlin.

His TV appearances included Coronation Street, Brookside and EastEnders.

He also wrote: he adapted Edgar Allan Poe’s The Telltale Heart for radio and stage and wrote Distant Voices,

an original work incorporating seven of Tennyson’s Lincolnshire dialect poems.

He was a member of the Labyrinth Poets in Vienna, who gave regular public readings.

In 1996 and 1997 he performed at the English Theatre in Vienna, as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

and as Oliver and Touchstone in As You Like It;

he loved the city, and settled there in 1998, working as a performer, musician, writer and translator.

Though we were friends for more than 30 years, I had the privilege of directing him only once,

in a 1992 tour of a double-bill of Distant Voices and a rendering of Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur.

His passion was electrifying. We had often talked of reviving that production.

He is survived by his brother, Chris, sister-in-law Jane, nephew Mark and niece Mandy.

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