John Tasker (theatre director)
British theatre director
John Howard Tasker (25 May 1933 – 18 June 1988) was an Australian theatre director.
Biography
He was born in Newcastle, New South Wales and educated at Newcastle Boys’ High School. Travelling to Europe at age 18, he studied at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art and teaching at the University of London.
He was at one time the lover of the English author, journalist, and broadcaster Colin Spencer. They met in Brighton in 1957, when both were 24 years old. Their off-and-on two-year relationship dramatically changed when Spencer married archaeologist Gillian Chapman in October 1959. Returning to Australia, Tasker became a theatre director, and died of cancer in 1988. Tasker had arranged for his letters to be returned to Spencer. Upon re-reading them, Spencer published his book Which of Us Two as a form of atonement.
Patrick White chose Tasker to produce the play The Ham Funeral for the University of Adelaide Theatre Guild (premiere in Union Hall in 1961).
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This entry incorporates text from “John Tasker (theatre director)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.