What Have You Got On?

Michael Codron was once asked if the description of him as 'a man of impeccable taste with a vulgar streak' was accurate, to which he responded, it should be 'a man of vulgar taste with an impeccable streak.' The question of the title is one more often asked of Michael Codron, unquestionably the leading producer of the British commercial theatre since the war. His career as an independent impresario spans one half of a century (he is now 76) and although his usual avoidance of personal publicity means he is perhaps not such a public figure as Cameron Mackintosh or Andrew Lloyd Webber, within the theatre world on both sides of the Atlantic he is widely known and enormously respected. At last he has been persuaded by Alan Strachan (noted theatre director) and biographer (Michael Redgrave) to tell his story, both professional (he says that in the second half of his seventies he has nothing to hide and no-one to fear) and personal (more of that in a moment).
The professional record is awesome; after his time at Oxford amid an outstanding generation - John Schlesinger, Sandy Wilson (the Boy Friend), Anthony Blond, Alan Clark etc - and an unhappy time working in his father's carpet business (he can trace his descent through a long line of Sephardic Jews) he began in the theatre as an assistant to the powerful West End producer Jack Hylton, where one of his early jobs was to go each week from the Hylton office with envelopes stuffed with cash with which to pay Marlene Dietrich's huge fees. He would slip the envelopes under the door of her suite! His early years were often perilous - a big musical, The Golden Touch, lost him a fortune and he was rescued only by the success of The Caretaker by Harold Pinter. Codron had been an early champion of Pinter, even though he had lost money on the first production of he Birthday Party, which had been critically dismissed in 1957.