Oscar Lewenstein

Silvion Oscar Lewenstein (18 January 1917 – 23 February 1997) was a British theatre and film producer, who helped create some of the leading British theatre and film productions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Early life and career Born in Hackney, London, Lewenstein was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had fled antisemitism before the Russian Revolution. Lewenstein co-founded the English Stage Company in 1954 with director George Devine and dramatist Ronald Duncan.

In the West End, Lewenstein produced Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera in 1956 and Saint Joan of the Stockyards in 1964. He was also responsible for three of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop productions, including Brendan Behan's The Hostage and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey transferring to the West End at around the same time, to the detriment of Littlewood's company. The theatre and film director Lindsay Anderson, who thought Lewenstein was "the strangest mixture of foolishness and (sometimes) good intuitions" worked with him on The White Bus (1967), a short film based on one of Shelagh Delaney's short stories.

In 1970, after Neville Blond died, Lewenstein became chairman of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre jointly with Robin Fox, and then sole chairman in 1971 after Fox died. He was artistic director of the English Stage Company from 1972 to 1975, after two years as chairman. In October 1974, Lewenstein instigated a letter to The Times, signed by 13 other theatre directors, over a perception that the funding of the new National Theatre building (which eventually opened in 1976) would starve the rest of subsided theatre in Britain. Peter Hall, then the National Theatre's artistic director, admitted in his Diaries calling him a "shit and a creep" to his face in a chance encounter at the National Film Theatre. Lewenstein much admired Orton's plays, and while Lewenstein was artistic director of the Royal Court he organised a season of the dramatist's work, which included a successful revival of What the Butler Saw in a production by Lindsay Anderson.

Among the thousands who had left the Communist Party in 1956, Lewenstein remained a socialist for the rest of his life. Lewenstein's memoir Kicking Against the Pricks: A Theatre Producer Looks Back was published in 1994 by Nick Hern Books.

Lewenstein died of heart failure, aged 80, at his home in Hove, Sussex.